


To the Marriage of True Minds, or, To the Edge of Doom

by madame_faust



Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Durin Family Feels, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:21:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madame_faust/pseuds/madame_faust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The courtship, consummation, and dissolution of the marriage of Thráin and Freya, King and Queen in Exile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing and am making no profit from this story.
> 
> This is probably going to wind up being a series of interrelated one-shots, I'm not sure I'll be updating this as frequently as I do my other stories. I fully intended to put up another installment of _The Road Goes Ever On (and On)_ tonight, but this plot bunny bit and wouldn't let go! Title comes from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, which I cynically twisted for my own purposes, Dwarf names are unapologetically pulled from Norse mythology and Scandinavian history.

As the sound of the drums died away, replaced by the pounding of the blood in her ears, Freya knew her fate was sealed. It was Durin’s Day Eve and she was eighty years old. Young, perhaps, to see her future laid out in full before her, but as she bowed to her cousin Frigga, with whom she completed her sword dance, she happened to catch the eye of Prince Thráin and was filled with an inexplicable sense of knowing. _This is it,_ a voice in her heart seemed to whisper. _This is where it begins._

Freya knew their prince by sight, being Durin’s Folk they were likely distant cousins, but she was sure he did not know her name. He wanted to know it now, she saw. His broad clear brow was furrowed and he stared at her, unblinking, as she left the circle of stones where they danced and made for the Healers waiting to patch them up. The crowd approved of their dance, roaring and stamping their approval, but the sound seemed to come from far away. All Freya was conscious of was a pair of blue eyes, dark and stormy as she imagined the sea must be, fixed unblinkingly upon her.

 _The prince is very...serious,_ the people of Erebor would say, if asked to make a comment on Thráin. He stood in sharp contrast to his gregarious, open-hearted father and King, who was much beloved by his subjects. That is not to say that Thráin was unpopular, merely unknowable. He rarely spoke more than five words together and did not mingle much among his contemporaries. He was a fine rider and a gifted swordsman who was smithing his own weapons by the time he was seventy-five, but it was rare that any living thing could hold his notice. Most predicted he would be one of those dwarves who never married, preferring the predictability of his work to the murkiness of relations with a fellow creature. Now heads turned and voices murmured as the young prince seemed to have taken a quick fancy to Freya, daughter of Freyr, one of the most respected warriors in the King’s Guard.

“That’ll take seven or eight stitches,” the healer tending to her announced, frowning at a deep wound in her shoulder. “Very nice block, saved you from getting hit somewhere lethal.”

“What a pity that would’ve been,” Freya remarked, trying to casually twist her head around to see if she still had the prince’s notice.

Frigga, drinking down some tonic the Healer provided, leaned over and touched her uninjured shoulder, “He’s still looking,” she winked and whispered. She’d come off rather the worse in their bout, but she was smiling even as one eye purpled and swelled. Both girls did their families proud, but Frigga was happy not to have excited royal notice; the life of a king’s wife would suit her ill.

Freya’s healer took the bottle from Frigga and urged his patient to drink. The whiskey noticed immediately, but there was another, floral taste underneath and the beverage was warm. Poppy, for the pain. Something warm and pleasurable spread through her and she could not stop smiling as the Healers stitched her wounds and wrapped her chest, but it had nothing to do with the effect of the herbs. It was triumph. The feeling was new and thrilling, as was the knowledge that came with it. Until today she knew she was young and she knew she was beautiful, but she never knew what it was to be _powerful_ and she savored the sensation.

“Alright, lass, off you go,” the healer said gruffly when he finished his wrapping. “I’d tell you not to dance too much, but I’ve been at this long enough to know you won’t listen.”

“But I appreciate the advice all the same,” Freya smiled and hopped off the table, feeling a twinge of pain in her chest. Get a few more drinks in her and she’d be able to ignore the pain until morning.

Frigga too was given a clean bill of health, one arm was splinted and her nose was still bleeding sluggishly into her beard, but she threw her good arm around her cousin and embraced her heartily. “Well fought!” she proclaimed with a bright smile. “Thanks for waiting for me.”

This was the first year Frigga was eligible for sword dancing for she’d only reached the age of majority last winter. Freya was enormously fond of her cousin and vowed to be her partner years ago, which meant she was a few years overdue for her sword dance. No matter, she could see now that the wait was well worth it. “You are most welcome, m’darling,” she smiled, teeth still tinged pink with blood.

That was all they had the chance to say to one another before they found their bruised bodies crushed against a broad chest. “My little lassies!” a deep voice boomed with delight. “My lovely girls, that was a bout for the ages - the ages! I couldn’t be more proud if you brought me the head of Nidhug for mounting!”

Freya’s father was clearly very drunk if he thought a coming-of-age dance was comparable to the slaying of the dragon that killed old King Dáin and their current regent’s brother Grór, but she would accept the compliment. They were rarely given from her father and always sincerely meant - even if, in this case, they were mildly exaggerated. “Thank you, Ada,” she smiled into his beard.

Likewise, Frigga too thanked her uncle, embracing him with her undamaged arm. He only just released them, tears of joy in his eyes when the girls felt more slender hands upon them and Freya’s mother said, “No one could have done better, I am very pleased with you both.”

Herdis personally trained both girls for the sword dance, since Frigga’s parents were long dead and she had no older sister. With one hand on each of their shoulders, she led them away from the hall, saying, “And now dress for the rest of the evening, we’ll hurry so you won’t miss too much.”

As they made haste for their own chambers within the mountain, Freya looked back over her shoulder, hoping to catch another look at the handsome dwarf prince, but did not see him among the hubbub of the festivities.

* * *

Thráin, who knew all the nooks and crannies of the mountain by heart, took a side passage to find a moment’s respite from the noise and heat of the great hall. His mind was all abuzz and his heart was pounding as though he’d been running for miles. Who _was_ that creature? He knew her, the daughter of Freyr who was pretty enough, he supposed with her golden hair and eyes of pale blue, but he’d never seen her as she was tonight. Usually she had a wry look on her face, as if she was privy to some embarrassing truth about everyone around her and found it amusing, but she was absolutely ferocious in her dance and looked, in short, _magnificent_.

The image of her, flail spinning about her, a blur of metal in her strong, capable hands, was burned upon his eyes and he could not stop _staring_ , like an idiot after her as she went to be ministered to by their healers and vanished from view. He had to see her again - but what would he say? What could one say to a woman such as that? Anything he could think of, _Good dance,_ or _You looked very beautiful_ , or _Would you do me the honor of accepting my hand in marriage?_ sounded inane or worse, insane. He was the sole heir of their kingdom, but the riches of the mountain seemed a poor offer when compared to _her_.

Thráin did not know how long he avoided the festivities, but it was long enough that his father took notice and went looking for him. The king had a knack for finding his son in odd places, especially when the lad did not wish to be found.

“There you are, my boy!” Thrór exclaimed, clapping his son on the shoulder.

Before his father could speak another word, Thráin blurted out, “I’m going to marry that girl.”

There could be no question as to who he was talking about, for Thrain was beside his father during the dance and Thrór would have been a poor sire indeed not to notice the enraptured expression on his son’s face. The reaction to his proclamation ought not to have come as a surprise, but it angered Thráin nevertheless. Without even pausing to consider his son’s words, Thrór threw his head back and laughed, the sound amplified by the high ceiling and sounding twice as mocking for it.

Thráin scowled and made to walk away, but his father stopped him, grasping out between guffaws, “No, no, don’t believe I laugh at _you_ , m’lad. It’s only that I’m damned relieved!”

Thráin eyed his father suspiciously. “Relieved?” he repeated. Perhaps he was relieved that he voiced an intention to marry at all and thus secure their line.

Thrór’s eyes twinkled brightly beneath his thick grey brows and he grinned at his son. “Your mother said the same thing to me when those young ladies were finished and I was worried there would be bloodshed if you disagreed with her.” No doubt there would have been, Thráin’s specifically. The Queen was not the sort of person one contradicted when she had her mind set on something. “Marry her, by all means! You have your parents’ blessing already, may Mahal keep you and may mithril find you!”

For all his years ruling under the Mountain, the king could look every inch the mischievous apprentice when the mood took him. So it did now as he regarded his stone-faced son and stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Just one snag as I see it - have you actually _spoken_ to her, lad?”

Scowl deepening, his son was forced to admit that he had not. “Nor do I know what I would say if I did,” he lamented quietly.

Clapping him on the back, his father steered him toward the merriment beyond them. “None of us do, but you’ve got wits aplenty, I’m sure you’ll think of something clever.”

As father and son entered back into the light of the hall, they were intercepted by Fundin, head of the King’s Guard and one of Thrór’s most trusted courtiers, not to mention Thráin's uncle by marriage. “Dagger of love straight to the heart, eh?” he asked, grinning nearly as foolishly as his king was. “Remember when it happened to me. Always fatal, that is.”

Thráin had enough dignity to glare up at him. “I don’t know what you - ” he began, but the words stuck in his throat for there she was.

The blood was washed away and her blonde beard shone in the torchlight. Her long coat almost touched the floor, embroidered through with silver thread that glittered as she walked. Even out of the fray she walked with her head up and the expression on her face did not seem so remote and superior now. It was like she had a secret she carried about with her, a secret Thráin desperately wished to share. Quite without warning, their eyes met and she smiled, smoothing a golden braid back unnecessarily.

Beside him, Thráin heard a rumbling chuckle from his father and he felt rather than saw their guard lean down to offer a word of advice.

“You might try bidding her good evening,” Fundin suggested.

And so he did.


	2. Chapter 2

The day before what was to have been her wedding, a message came from the Iron Hills that all able-bodied dwarves were needed to beat back an invasion of Goblins who were overtaking their mines. The cousins of the Erebor dwarves were skilled and mighty, but the deformed little creatures that crawled below ground, burrowing like moles, shrinking from the light of day, threatened to overwhelm them by sheer numbers.

Freya knew without being told that the wedding feast and ceremony would be postponed - perhaps indefinitely. She did not shed a tear or even complain for theirs was a stout-hearted race. To die in combat, defending their kinsfolk from that lowly plague of ratspawn was an honor surpassing marriage. Freya well knew this and, when her father took up his armor and spear, she managed to conceal the hammer of disappointment that struck her heart.

Frigga was less circumspect in her response. “This is terrible!” she moaned to Freya when they were quite alone. There was a feast before the battle and they knew that many of the roasts and pies and better ales were originally meant for the wedding. “That’s meant to be for _you_ , aren’t you vexed?”

“Not at all,” Freya shook her head. “Mightn’t be a wedding. And then it’ll all go to waste and do no one any good.”

Her cousin looked shocked that she would give voice to such morbidity. Frigga was a kind lass, a good soul, but also very soft-hearted in a way that her cousin had never been. She was disappointed enough for both of them. “Freya! How can you be so...”

“What?” the bride-to-be (bride-that-never- would-be, they could engrave it on her tombstone) asked coldly. “Will my tears seal his wounds? Will my wails be heard in the Iron Hills? Will the Goblins perk their pointed ears up and say, ‘Ah, well, _Freya_ of Erebor thinks we ought not wage war, let’s crawl back into the mire from which we were spawned and forget the whole thing?’ Will that happen if I tear my beard and beat my breast, dear?”

Frigga frowned. “No, it won’t,” she admitted.

“Then let’s say no more about it.”

The menfolk were to go before first light. After the casks were emptied and the meat stores exhausted the women withdrew to their chambers, taking with them the little dwarflings who cried and reached out for their fathers, brothers and uncles, not having learned to contain themselves. They did not know how much war would define their lives and what a privilege it was to fight and die for their people and homeland. They would learn tomorrow.

That night, Freya could not sleep, the pounding of the war drums did not lull her into slumber as they usually did, instead they only seemed to amplify the pounding of the blood in her ears. Silent as she could, she put on a robe and crept out of the chambers she now only shared with her mother and cousin. Only half the usual number of torches were lit, the halls were dark and cold and the statues that seemed so regal during the hours the people of the Mountain were up and about now seemed to loom over her.

 _Shame,_ their eyes, shadowed beneath their helms, glared at her. _Cowardice._

Erebor never truly slept. The mines were active all day and night, but now more than half their laborers were readying themselves for battle. The women and young men who stayed behind were not force enough to resound a reassuring tap-tap below their feet, echoing into the chambers above. It was easy to believe, on a night like this, that one was truly alone in the world.

If Freya was less of a dwarf, she might have screamed when a tall, dark figure peeled itself out of the shadows to stand in her path. As it was, she stiffened only slightly, then laughed, the sound a welcome relief to the still and quiet of the night.

“What are you doing away from your shieldbrothers?” she asked Thráin, not bothering to keep her voice down. Who was awake to hear them?

“What are you doing out of bed?” he asked her and Freya smiled; it was obvious what path they both trod that evening, each one setting out to find the other and meeting in the middle.

“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” Freya asked, teasingly, closing the distance between them. Thráin caressed her hair, braided loosely down her back for sleeping. He loved her hair and he stared at it now with a singular intensity, as if he was worried he’d never see it again.

  
Thráin was not a ‘talker,’ as her mother observed, not generally, but under extreme duress he could manage to become quite eloquent. “If this is the last time we meet - ”

Freya was not in the mood for eloquence. She sealed his mouth shut with her lips. The kiss was deep, needy and she made no special effort to be gentle, catching his bottom lip with her teeth and pulling away roughly, tasting the barest coppery tang on her tongue. “There,” she said, satisfied. “I’ve marked you. I drew first blood. You’re mine now, to keep, they’ll know that. Those beasts only speak the language of blood.”

And before he could say another word to her, she fled back to her chambers, swallowed her sobs and smothered her tears in a pillow.

* * *

The last thing Thráin saw before he was carried insensible from the battlefield was a glimmer of gold on the edge of his vision. Treasure from the mines of the Iron Hills no doubt, but he defied his own disbelief and ploddingly dull sensibility to fancy it was _her_ for a moment before the pain overwhelmed him so that he lost consciousness.

When he woke, he woke in darkness. “Steady on,” a healer - he knew the gentle burr of that voice, it was Óin, his young cousin. “Don’t fight, you’ll tear the wrappings.”

“How...” Thráin rasped and a cup was placed to his mouth. He drank it down greedily and tried to rise from the bed he was placed on, but strong hands held him fast and he remained as he was. “Where am I?”

“Erebor,” Óin replied, then paused so Thráin could absorb the information. It took nearly two weeks to travel from the Iron Hills home. How long had he been asleep? “We’ve kept you out cold,” was the response to his unanswered question. “Every time you woke up...well, it was safer this way for you, make no mistake. What’s the last thing you remember?”

 _I saw Freya,_ he wanted to say, but his wits weren’t so addled that he gave the thought voice. What did he remember? The fight was fierce and hot, stifling really, underground in the mine shafts that had grown foetid with Goblin filth. His warhammer gone, he fought with shield and sword now, but there were so _many_ of them, too many for close combat, but the confines of the mines meant their archers could not fire their arrows for fear of wounding a comrade. Dwarves were warriors, but they were not animals. They would not sacrifice a brother-in-arms to gain ground.

Something hot, hotter than the air around him flashed before his face, it flared, glimmered and then darkness took him.

“My skin was melting,” he said, for it was the last proper sensation he felt. There were other vague impressions, waking in pain and alone, lashing out against imagined captors, but they seemed more like dreams than memories.

Óin sighed and, Thráin imagined, nodded. “Aye,” he said, almost reluctantly. He’d only recently completed his apprenticeship and was not accustomed to giving his charges bad news. “You took a faceful of coals. You’ve got Náin to thank for pulling out out of the fray and...saving that handsome face of yours.”

There was a hitch in his voice on the word ‘saving,’ if Thráin hadn’t been listening _very_ closely, he might have missed it. “And my father?”

“The king is well,” Óin reassured him. “My father says he always was lucky in battle, got out with nary a scratch on him.” The healer left off the description of the howl of grief that escaped their proud king’s mouth when the battle was through and he saw his son lying unmoving on a stretcher. When he found out Tháin was not mortally wounded, merely maimed, he wept his relief in plain sight of all his warriors.

It was enough for Thráin to know his father was well and his lips moved in a silent prayer of gratitude to the Maker that Thrór lived to fight another day. Then he moved on to his most immediate concern. “Why can’t I see anything?”

“The cloth is for protection while your worst wounds were healing,” Óin said, sounding now so clipped and serious he might have been reading off an instructional text. “We’ve removed the wrappings a few times to change the bandages, it’s healing nice and clean. No festering.”

It was a relief to know he wouldn’t be dying of fever and infection, but Thráin desperately wanted the bandages off, he wanted to see where he was and know he was home, he wanted to see his father, see his bride, the desire to _see_ was slowly building from spark to conflation within him, but he could not ask. The thought that, if he did ask, and Óin told him he would see _nothing_ frightened him to the core.

“You said you’d call me when he woke!” Freya, of course. Who else would come bursting into a sickroom like a boulder down a mountainside?

“I said I’d call you _after_ he woke,” Óin groused, sounding something like himself again. “How was I to know ‘when’? I’m not a fortune-teller. How’d you get in here, anyway? The King and Queen aren’t even supposed to be admitted!”

Thráin could not see it, but he knew well the triumphant, sly smile Freya bestowed upon the healer. “I have my ways,” she said mysteriously and her heavy warmth dipped the mattress beside Thrain as she curled up beside him, the top of her head on his chest, her hair tickling his nose. Blindly, one of his hands reached out and stroked her thick locks, almost reverently.

“Thank you for coming back to me,” she whispered raggedly and it was only then that he realized how afraid she was. That surprised Thráin, he thought her fearless and he carried the memory of her fierce kiss with him into battle. He had to be at least as strong as she was and the vision of her in his mind made heavy his blows and sharpened his attacks. Though she was not permitted to wield a weapon in combat, Freya was there with him on the battlefield regardless.

“You marked me.” Whatever the healers had given him to keep him calm was still strong in his blood and Thráin spoke almost giddily, feeling his lips curl in a smile. “They knew I was yours to keep in life and death. You were right; they spoke the language of blood.”

Óin cleared his throat and moved around to the other side of the bed. “Freya, if you don't _mind_ ,” he said, giving up on any attempt at being polite in the face of her stubbornness.

They weight of Freya’s head left his chest, but she did not rise from the bed. “I’m not leaving,” she said stubbornly.

“I’m not asking you to - the Maker alone knows it would be more trouble than it’s worth, but I am asking you to _get out of the way_.”

Freya moved approximately a quarter of an inch toward the edge of the bed, picking up one of Thráin’s hands and holding it firmly between both of her own, chaffing it slightly to bring some warmth into his cold fingertips. Óin sighed, but cut and removed the bandages quickly and efficiently. “You can open your - well. You can see now, if you’d like.”

Thráin tried to open his eyes, but only one responded. Luckily, it was his right eye, on which side Freya was sitting - deliberately, it turned out. She was slightly blurry around the edges, but the longer he looked the sharper she became. Every inch of her was beautiful, from the crown of her golden hair to the dark circles under her red eyes. And she was smiling at him.

Freya bent her face close to him and gently touched her lips to the broken brow above the scarred crater that once held his left eye. The pressure stung like nettles, but he bore it, grateful to feel her lips against his face at all. “My valiant warrior,” she said, then softly added, “ _Mine_.”

“Yours,” Thráin whispered back before Óin shooed her away so he could replace the bandages. He soon fell back to sleep again, his hand still tightly clasped in hers and the image of her face and hair the last thing he saw before he drifted off.

Later, he would learn that her father was dead, pierced through with filthy daggers defending his King. It was an honorable death and the funeral was nearly as well-attended and lauded as their wedding. When they did finally celebrate their nuptials and Thráin took his wife to bed, she was the one who was bandaged. He took care, in their passion, to avoid touching her right arm overmuch for it was new-inked. Red and black for grief, pride and remembrance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I'm beginning to realize just how _intense_ these two are. That's the line of Durin for you.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We knew it would come to this eventually. The chapter where things start to unravel for our lovely couple. This is a LONG chapter, so buckle up. And it will probably make you sad. So don't read it if you don't want to be sad. Oh my god, you guys, it's SO SAD. And it's not even the saddest thing I've got planned yet.
> 
>  **Warnings** : Within this chapter you will find **frank discussion** of **maternal ambiguity** , **birth** , **complications of birth** , **miscarriage** and the beginnings of Thráin's **anxiety/depression**. But there's bb!dwarves to make up for it.

No one asked her if she wanted to be a mother. Once she’d married, it was expected that, sooner or later, she would bear a child, probably a son. The day was looked on with vague anticipation, for there was no telling when the prince and princess would conceive. Thráin was born late to his parents and he was their only child. In truth, Freya thought on it little, when she coupled with her husband her head was filled only with the feel of their joined bodies and not what might someday result from it all.

After five years of marriage, not so very long at all among dwarves, she found herself big bellied and thinking that perhaps she was not so eager to become a mother now that each day brought her closer to the reality.

“Have you given any thought to what his Name will be?” Freya asked her husband one night, lying beside him in the dark. It was so rare for a couple to have a girl child for their first birth that nearly all dwarves assumed their eldest children would be male and acted accordingly in preparation for the birth. Thráin was so still and quiet that his wife wondered whether or not he’d fallen asleep already, but he turned to her lay a hand on her stomach beneath her nightclothes.

The slight pressure of the infant’s movement made him smile, but he was forced to admit that he’d been remiss in his fatherly duty. “Not much, no.” And that was all he said before he kissed her, rolled over and fell asleep. Freya lay awake for interminable hours after, feeling the babe move about; he was restless as well, this little no-named thing that she was not entirely certain she even _wanted_.

It was no use talking to her mother; Herdís was beside herself with joy at the prospect of being a grandmother and every time Freya voiced anything that had the faintest ring of worry in it, her mother would merely embrace her and tell her that, of course, everything would be fine, just fine and not to worry about it. “You’ll be a natural,” she said, in a manner meant to reassure. “Just wait ‘til you hold your wee one in your arms.”

Wait until the child was born before she learned how to raise it? Seemed an awfully risky gamble.

Frigga was, if anything, even worse. “Lucky!” she told her at least once weekly. “And you aren’t even a hundred yet, if you and Thrain have one every ten years, that’s at least five or more little nephews and nieces to spoil!”

Freya liked to consider herself a stout-hearted dwarf, but the idea of going through this process _five_ times more made her want to retch. Five years of this worry and uncertainty and feeling and having her body taken over by this creature that was meant to bring her great happiness, but felt like a parasite more often than not. She’d really rather not.

It never even occurred to her to ask her mother-in-law for advice. Sigdís, Queen Under the Mountain was a famous figure in her own right, a huntswoman of great renown whose eyes were sharp enough now to take down a warg at fifty paces with a single arrow. Freya was convinced that the woman never failed at anything she set her mind to and would take any voiced concern over her suitability for motherhood as a sign of weakness.

She discovered an ally in the Lady Halldóra, of all the unlikely souls. A friend more of Thráin than herself, the absent-minded scribe was one of the youngest advisors in Thrór’s court and a particular favorite of the King. Usually when she stopped by their home for pipes and tea (well, Freya drank tea, she’d never seen Halldóra with a drink that wasn’t mead or strong black coffee in her hand), she and Thráin would talk and chuckle over topics of court that Freya found mind-numbingly boring. Quarrels between warring parties were all well and good, but when her husband and his father’s scribe got started on inventories and legal documents they could go on for ages before someone finally told them to save it for the council chambers.

Yet it was to Halldóra, chatty little Halldóra with her hair full of quill, her ink-stained fingers, and her perpetual squint, whom she found herself confiding her worries. Since little Dwalin was born, he came more often than not when his mother paid a visit. It was no trouble to have him, he was good as gold, always smiling and cooing and babbling with whomever it was had him in their arms. Looking at the babe, with his dimpled cheeks, thick dark hair and enormous brown eyes it was easier to imagine herself with her own child. For who could not love one such as that?

Their husbands were at the archery ranges with his elder brother, they asked their wives if they wanted to join them, but Freya preferred to remain off her feet as much as possible in this late stage and Halldóra said she’d be less than useless as a judge of her son’s talent with her bad eyes. “But enjoy yourselves!” she encouraged, raising Dwalin’s chubby little arm to wave good-bye to them on her behalf.

Wrenching his arm out of his mother’s grasp, Dwalin tugged at the front of her robes, bumping his head against her chest. “Oh, aye, and I know what _you_ want,” she remarked, rolling her eyes and unbuckling the front of her robe with one practiced hand that she might pull her tunic down so he could nurse. “That’s alright, I’m sure you’ll be tottering off to the ranges soon enough.”

“Did you always want children?” Freya blurted out a moment before she realized the question was even on her mind. To her credit the scribe did not act surprised; on the contrary, she looked thoughtful.

“Always...no, I don’t think so,” she replied, hitching a shoulder in a shrug as Dwalin buried one fist in the thick, wolfskin lining of her robe. “I don’t know when I first thought I did. Not ‘til after my apprenticeship, at the very least.”

Freya mulled those thoughts. Scribes were usually apprenticed from forty until they were in their mid-eighties or early nineties, depending on their aptitude. Freya was ninety-five, heavily pregnant and she _still_ wasn’t sure. “When you were courting Fundin?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Halldóra smiled fondly. “But no, to be honest. When we married, I only wanted _him_ , I didn’t care one way or the other about bearing his children. Of course, you, know, there’s the blessing for fertility in the ceremony, but I don’t think I heard a word of it. I just kept thinking, _’Three more prayers until we get to the bloodletting...two more prayers until we get to the bloodletting...we pledge our consent and then we get to the bloodletting..._ ’”

The younger dwarf actually laughed; her thoughts had traveled much the same path during her own wedding. “But you did want them eventually.”

“Eventually,” Halldóra agreed, smiling down at the babe in her arms with a look of utter adoration. “ _Especially_ Dwalin - not that I didn’t want Balin, of course, but we were kept much longer waiting for this little gem.”

“How many did you lose?” she asked. More common were miscarriages among dwarves than live births. Freya had not suffered any, as yet, but considering the gulf of nearly forty years that separated Halldóra’s sons, it would be foolish in the extreme to assume she had not lost any children in the womb. “Between Balin and Dwalin.”

“Three,” Halldóra replied promptly and without passion. It was long ago and she had a healthy baby boy in her arms; many women suffered the disappointment over and over without a happy outcome. “The last one, it was so early, I didn’t even know I was expecting until I saw the blood.”

“Did you - I’m sorry,” Freya looked away, and passed a hand over her brow. “I have no business asking.”

“If I don’t want to answer, I’ll tell you as much,” Halldóra said, smiling on her very kindly. “Go on, I don’t like leaving questions unasked.”

“Did you love them? The ones you lost?”

Halldóra was so quiet for so long that Freya was on the verge of apologizing again when at last she spoke. “Speaking for myself only, you understand...I don’t think I did. I might have loved the _idea_ of them, in a way. But to say I loved those I lost like I love the lads I’ve got...nah. Doesn’t hold a candle. If it did, I might’ve gone mad with grief and while some might accuse me of being a little addled, it’s surely not from grief.”

“And,” Freya hesitated, but plunged on ahead, having been given leave to speak as freely as she wished. “When did you love the two you have?”

This time there was no pause. Halldóra’s eyes faintly glittered like diamonds when she said, “Moment I saw them - actually, I was in a bad way with Dwalin, I heard him ere I laid eyes on him. Lusty wail, he had. So I loved him then.”

“I don’t,” Freya said, shaking her head and worrying her lip. “Mine. I don’t know how I feel about all this, but I don’t think it’s love.” Tears were stinging at the corners of her eyes, but she pressed her fingertips into her eyelids and refused to let them fall. There was the sound of shifting fabric, then a weight settled next to her

“It’s alright,” Halldóra said gently, putting her free arm around Freya and letting her rest her head on her shoulder. The older woman’s neatly braided beard was a comforting softness on her brow. The gesture was undeniably _motherly_ and Freya felt torn. It would never occur to her to try to comfort another dwarrowdam she was not particularly close with, was this a skill Halldóra naturally possessed or was it an outcropping of her knack for motherhood?

“It’s not,” Freya replied quietly, brushing her tears away before they could fall down her cheeks. “I hate failing.”

“I’m not a soothsayer, but listen: you haven’t failed at anything. Little lad’s not even born yet! You haven’t had the chance! Now, the fact that, far as I know, he doesn’t have a _name_ yet is a bit more worrisome,” Halldóra added with a smile and Freya laughed shakily.

“Aye, that’s true,” she admitted, sitting up and drying her eyes. “Thráin doesn’t seem much bothered by it, but I can’t hardly pick one without him at least giving an opinion. At least once he’s born we’ll have eight days before he’s Named, but I’d like to have something to call him by in the meantime.”

“He’s a hard one to get talking, your husband,” the scribe nodded with a meaningful roll of her eyes. “But I’ll see if I can’t help you get it sorted. Would naming him make you feel a bit better?”

“I don’t know,” Freya replied. “But it might.”

* * *

 

“What’s it like?” Thráin asked Fundin as they watched Balin repeatedly take up the bow and arrow and miss his target. The lad was getting frustrated by their constant suggestions, so his father decided they would step back and let him find his own way.

Fundin did not seem to understand the question. “Hitting the target?” he asked, a teasing tone in his voice. “Feels just fine, been a long while since one of your arrows have struck home, eh?”

Thráin snorted, “Aye, now you mention it. Don’t tell my mother. But that’s not what I was talking about.”

“What were you talking about?”

Dwarves were plain-spoken and most did not do well when a conversant danced around a subject. Either they missed the point entirely or became frustrated that they were being giving the runaround. Fundin and Thráin’s friendship was of such a long duration that the elder dwarf knew the younger was a reluctant speaker at the best of times; sometimes the words needed to be pulled from him.

“Birth,” Thráin said after a moment. “I’ve never attended one. I’ve heard it’s worse than warfare.”

“Sometimes,” Fundin nodded. “Worse in that it’s the one you love most in pain and there’s no heads to smash or bones to break to make it stop. Better in that you get a wee one to hold when all’s said and done.”

“You attended Balin and Dwalin’s births,” Thráin observed. It was more a statement than a question, but Fundin nodded all the same and confirmed the truth of it. “You were with her the whole time?

“Aye. She labored four days with Balin’s, but that was easy compared to what she went through with Dwalin - partly her fault, she admits it now, but Dóra can be ass stubborn when she wants to be, no two ways about it.”

“I remember,” Thráin replied grimly. His father was in the middle of renewing a peace treaty with King Thranduil of Greenwood at the time and Halldóra, who knew the Elvish language as fluently as she spoke and signed their own father tongue, was there to make note of any communication the Elves spoke among themselves. She went into labor toward the end, but insisted on staying in the council halls, despite the pain. Balin took four days, she said. She thought she had plenty of time.

Fundin practically shivered when he spoke again, an odd sight to see from such a brutish figure. “Damn near bled to death,” he recalled. How could he forget his helplessness as his wife grew paler and the midwives whispered among themselves? If it wasn’t for his young nephew Óin, he might be a widower.

“What was the trouble?” Thráin asked. Unbeknownst to his wife, the reason he was so reluctant to sit and talk about names with her was the fact that he spent every spare minute he had in the library, pouring over the medical texts about birth. They were few and most documented only the cases where things went terribly wrong. He could not fathom naming a child in the womb and coming to care for it only for the infant to be struck with death. It happened often enough, even at this late stage, that he knew he had cause to fear the possibility.

“Shoulders got stuck,” Fundin replied immediately. “She’s such a little thing, it’s a wonder the same didn’t happen with Balin - anyway, the skin tore. Óin realized, he managed to sew her up before she lost too much blood. She was still so weak I had to carry her back to bed.” His eyes clouded over and he shook his head. “I remember when Balin came in to see his brother, she tried to sit up and nearly swooned. Good thing she was already lying down.”

Catching a glimpse of the sickened look on the prince’s face, Fundin hastily added, “Not that the same’ll happen to Freya. Tall, stout lassie, she is. It’s as I said, Dóra’s a wee thing. I’m sure yours won’t have any trouble at all.”

Regardless of the reassurances, all that Thráin remembered of the conversation after Balin stomped over to them and declared he would never be an archer and they retired to his rooms, was Fundin’s haunted expression as he said, _Damn near bled to death._

Even the sight of Halldóra now, hearty and whole with an equally hale Dwalin in her arms, did little to set his mind at ease. He kept picturing her pale, pained and near death, like a film laid on over a pane of glass.

“Thráin!” she called when they walked in, rising and passing her son off to her husband. “What’ll you be calling your son? Freya had I have been having a talk and we’ve decided there’s been far too much dilly-dallying and waffling, we’re getting the matter settled tonight.”

“You’re helping them name their son?” Fundin asked, cocking his head to the side as he settled Dwalin against his broad shoulder. No sooner had he done so than Balin stretched his arms up, insisting that he could hold his brother. Fundin handed the child to him and watched carefully as he sat down on the ground and told his little brother all about his failed archery lesson.

“Of course! None better for the job,” she smiled up at him smugly. “I’ve got enough rattling around between my years to re-name the Dwarves of Erebor with enough left over for the Elves of Greenwood and half the Men of Dale.”

“What’s all the fuss?” Fundin asked, looking between Thráin and Freya in bewilderment. “Just name him for his father and have done. It’s simple and it’s tradition.”

“Ah, aye, that’s right. Just as you and your brother were named for _your_ father,” Freya remarked wryly.

“Farin and Fundin are enough alike to suit me. And Gróin was named for our mother’s father,,” Fundin replied defensively.

“Farin, son of Borin,” Halldóra traced the lineage aloud. “Borin, son of Náin - ”

Thráin chuckled under his breath. “Son of Náin? Are congratulations in order?”

“Don’t be smart,” Halldóra chided him for his cheek. “Náin the _Second_ , then, if you need to be told. Father of Dáin, obviously - now there’s a thought! You could name him for your grandfather. It’d be a lovely tribute and Náin was rather useful to you some years ago, as it happened, I’m sure he would appreciate the sentiment - “

“Aye,” Thráin replied, folding his arms and looking mildly vexed at the reminder that his cousin dragged him to safety from the goblin-infested mines of the Iron Hills. “I’ve repaid the debt several times over. Is there a reason we’re tracing through _your_ family line?”

“It’s all one after a point,” Halldóra reminded him. “But if it suits you, Thráin, son of Thrór, son of Dáin, son of - ah, there he is, _Náin_ , son of Óin, son of - ”

“Son of Glóin, son of Thorin,” Balin piped up, evidently thinking his mother was taking far too long to trace the line of succession back to Father Durin.

“Aye, thank you dear,” Halldóra smiled. “And we’re back round to Thráin again.”

“Who was before that?” Fundin asked, but he was smirking as though he already knew the answer.

“Náin, of course,” his wife replied pertly.

“Thorin,” Freya repeated thoughtfully. “King of the Grey Mountains. How long was his reign?”

“Ninety-nine years,” Halldóra supplied promptly. “Not so very long, but he brought Durin’s Folk to the Grey Mountains after we were expelled from Khazad-dûm - he wasn’t born in exile, he was born here in Erebor, but he was ambitious. The kingdom enjoyed six-hundred years of prosperity before the dragons came.”

Freya did not seem to have been listening. “Thorin,” she said and inhaled sharply, feeling as though a great fist was squeezing her insides. Thráin was at her side in an instant, he saw the flicker of fear in her eyes and distantly heard Fundin say something about fetching the midwife before he hurried out the door with his sons.

“Ah, take that as a sign!” Halldóra said, coming up on Freya’s other side to help her stand. “Thorin it’ll be. He heard you calling. Come along, might be a few days’ wait, but you’ll want to get out of those robes - Thráin, dear, I expect you’ll want to alert her mother.”

“Of course,” he said somewhat numbly. Freya caught hold of his hand and held it in a vice-like grip.

“You’ll be back?” she asked. “You’ll stay?”

“Of course,” he repeated, easing his hand out of hers. “Of course.”

When her husband left, Halldóra slipped an arm around Freya’s waist, her stature making her the perfect height to use as an impromptu crutch. “Will you stay?” Freya asked impulsively, looking at the scribe with new eyes. She was beginning to suspect that Halldóra had a strength within her that she could not hope to match; Freya had grossly underestimated her worth.

“If you wish me to,” Halldóra said, reaching up to tilt Freya’s chin down so she could kiss her on the forehead. “You’re strong. You’ll do well. In a few days’ time, you’ll be holding your son in your arms, eh? And you’ll love him. I promise you’ll love him.”

The labor pains came hard and steady for the better part of three days.

For three days, Freya panted and sweat and bled to bring her child into this world and for three days Thráin held her, supported her and, above all, he feared for her. As the sun set before the mountain on the evening of the third day, Óin urged Freya to rest. She laughed in his face, but did manage to fall into a light exhausted slumber, her pale brow on her husband’s shoulder.

 _Damn near bled to death._ How much blood was too much blood? To Thráin’s untrained eye, there had been far too much already, but Óin was calmly washing his hands and...readying his needles.

 _I can’t do this,_ Thráin thought desperately. _I can’t do this._ He had a similar feeling of nameless dread creep upon him just before they entered the mines of the Iron Hills to face down a colony of goblins. The difference there was his anxiety was quelled by a flood of energy in his veins.

Then, with axe in hand, knowing he would leave victorious or die trying, he was able to press on, his body remembering to attack and defend even as his mind was overwhelmed with the very real possibility that he might not leave that foetid cavern. But this was no underground skirmish. This was for life. He had no weapons nor training to prepare him for this day.

 _Fight or flight_ , the old warriors said when it was all done. _Always kicks in to save you when you’re a step away from panic._

Then, armed and armored, Thráin fought. This day, unprotected and unprepared, he fled. When he stalked out of the room on legs that shook so badly he feared he would go crashing to the floor, his mother-in-law shouted after him. Óin told him that he’d best hurry back, it wouldn’t be long.

Wouldn’t be long. Until the life drained out of his wife, the babe died shortly thereafter and he was left with _nothing_? How cruel were the dwarves he left behind in that birthing room, that they would bid him stand witness.

He tried not to think of those who came before him who watched that exact thing happen to their own wives and children. Tried, but failed.

“Where do you think you’re going?” a high voice, no less booming for its pitch echoed down the corridor accompanied by the sound of swiftly running feet. Halldóra caught up with him and seized hold of his arm with more strength than he would have credited her with. Anger made her steely, it seemed. “Get back in that room!”

“You have no right to order me,” he said in a voice that did not sound like his own. A ring on his left middle finger, new-gifted from his father, seemed to cut into his skin and he desperately wanted to twist it, but Halldóra held him fast.

The dwarrowdam was not cowed; if anything, she seemed more furious. “ _I_ have no right? Well, pardon me, my prince, but your rights do not extend to leaving your wife to labor with your son and heir _alone_.”

 _She isn’t alone,_ he wanted to say. _She has her mother, her cousin, attendants, you, what am I? I can’t do anything but tremble with fear for her. I’m useless._ But what he said was infinitely worse. “What good is an heir if he’s dead?”

Halldóra was stunned. For one of the few times in her life, she was rendered speechless. “What are you talking about?”

What was he talking about? For the last few days, it seemed the world had a blackness over it, a cloud that did not lift and whose cover sunlight could not pierce. Light a torch, logic demanded. But Thráin had no matches to burn and no flint to strike a spark.

“I’m going back to your wife,” Halldóra said at last when no words were forthcoming. “I suggest you do so as well.”

And he did. After walking until his legs felt like jelly and his eyes felt the dry itch of having spent too many hours awake. Thráin returned to find his wife in bed, his newborn son in her arms. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth was set in a tight line. Sorrow? He guessed. Was it dead? Was their son dead after all?

Anger, he realized with no small measure of relief as he saw the bundle in her arms shift. She was furious with him. He’d never been so relieved in all his life. “I’m sorry,” he said as he drew close to the bed, obviously to the others in the room to made their way to the door to give the prince and princess a measure of privacy. “I’m so sorry.”

Freya did not want his apologizes; she wanted _him_. And he was not there. He stole out while she was sleeping. “Meet your son, then,” she said shortly, holding the little bundle of blankets out.

Thráin reached out and took the babe from his wife’s arms. So small, with scratches of dark hair on his head and cheeks. Tiny, red, scrunched little thing he was, but his eyes were open. Blue eyes. A little crossed. And Thráin smiled despite himself. “He’s...well, he’s...” but words failed him, as they so often did.

“His name’s Thorin,” Freya reminded him.

“Thorin, aye,” he said thickly, swallowing around a lump in his throat. “Well done. I really am...so very sorry, my love.”

The honest remorse, writ deep and sincere on his face, was enough for Freya. “I forgive you,” she said, leaning up to kiss her husband’s mouth firmly before she urged him sit on the bed alongside her. Thráin put an arm around her and for a brief moment, they forgot the rest of the world existed beyond the bedroom door.

It was the first time her husband disappointed her, but now, alone with the two creatures she found she loved most in the world, Freya was quite confident it would also be the last.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter nicely coincides with Chapter 2 of _A Good Man Goes to War_ (wherein Elves come to visit and I make Queen Sigdís Fundin's sister) and _Home at Last_ (Thorin and Thráin have a cuddle). For anyone who was wondering just why Thráin was sleeping on the couch in that one, now you'll know...
> 
> Khuzdul notes - 'ikhuzh' means 'stop.' (From the Dwarrow Scholar's Khuzdul-English Dictionary, as always.)

Thráin was not an easy dwarf to like, Freya discovered a few short years into their marriage. To be more specific, Thráin was not an easy dwarf for _her_ to like. She loved him, of course, with a passion and ferocity most dwarves reserved for their crafts or the battlefield, but there were many days when she thought she could wring his neck as easily as embrace him.

If asked to describe him in one word, she could not, for depending upon the day, the hour or the weather, he could be wonderful or horrible. He was generous, he was selfish. He was caring, he was cold. He was quiet, he was secretive.

And those black moods. The court called him serious, but they did not know the half of it. More often than she could count she went to bed with him only to wake alone and find him sitting by himself, staring at the coals in a fire that nearly burnt itself out. She tried to comfort him, though she was ill-suited to the task. She asked him what was wrong, but he was silent. She tried to coax him back to bed, but he would not move. Once, determined to do _something_ she took his hand and sat with him for hours, until Thorin cried from the nursery and Thráin rose like sleepwalker to look in on him.

Frustrated that neither speech nor silence made a difference, Freya stopped trying. Now, when she woke alone and cold in their bed, she merely tucked the blankets under her chin and hugged his pillow to her chest until she fell back to sleep. If Thráin wanted to worry himself to exhaustion, she would not lose sleep over it. Nothing she did made him any better and she decided, for her own sake, the her husband’s bad temper must be his problem to remedy, not hers.

There were good days too, more good than bad. When he remained abed and Freya woke with her head upon his chest, just over his heart. Or she caught him conversing with one of the duller guardsmen and his brow above the socket of his left eye would quirk ever so slightly and it was all she could do to keep from laughing. There were nights when his rough hands were upon her and she held him hard enough that her fingers left bruises on his arms. And days when she could make him laugh and forget those troubles that plagued him so mercilessly. Troubles she could do nothing to assuage when they were upon him, but that she tried to beat back when he was present and with her.

Sometimes he went away and it was nothing to do with his moods at all.

Thorin was more vocal about his displeasure than Freya ever allowed herself to be. For all he lamented that he had no gift with children, Thráin was a very competent father. When she told him as much, he laughed as though she thought he was teasing him.

“Competent, am I? Doesn’t sound like much,” he said wryly, laying a sleeping Thorin down in his cot after allowing the boy to tire himself out running in circles around the courtyard with Dwalin while Thráin looked on with a very bemused expression on his face.

But he was competent. Adequate. And, honestly, Thorin did not require very much to be satisfied. Room to run, arms to hold him when he was tired, and a fully belly made him very content most days.

The writhing, screaming little demon she held this day seemed a changeling child compared to her normally sedate son. “I want _Ada!_ ” he fussed and shrieked, tears squeezing out of the corners of his tightly shut eyes and trailing down his scrunched-up face. “I WANT HIM!”

Ada was gone away to war. Thráin had seen many battles since the first that almost took his life and never had he walked that close to death again, but Freya could not deny the fear she felt and carried in a tight, hard knot deep in a secret chamber of her heart. Thorin bore his fear and want nakedly, unashamed. Freya felt a twinge of cowardice pinching her nerves when she journeyed down to the temple to light a candle and pray to all their ancestors lost in battle that her husband not join their number.

But that private shame was nothing to the hot flush of embarrassment that turned her face as red as her son’s, for Thorin chose to pitch this particular fit in front of his _grandmother_ of all dwarves.

The queen was easily the most imposing person Freya knew. She _thought_ she liked her. Thráin joked, following her sword dance that if he hadn’t asked for her hand there was every chance his mother might have done, so impressed was she by Freya’s prowess with sword and flail. For that reason, Freya took care that she always put her best foot forward in her mother-in-law’s presence. She never wanted to seem less than hardy, capable and stoic, but her son was testing her patience to the breaking point and Sigdís’s keen eyes saw _everything_.

Silently, Sigdís held out her hands for her grandson and, feeling like a failure, Freya complied, handing Thorin over and nearly taking a knock to the teeth when he threw himself backwards away from them both.

Sigdís caught his chin firmly, but gently with the tips of his fingers and bid him cease. “Ikhuzh,” she ordered in her and Thorin’s screams faded away, but he still sobbed with little gasps that shook his small frame. “Look at me,” she said and her grandson’s blue eyes popped open, still swimming with tears unshed. “Now. What’s all this?”

“I want - ”

“I heard you,” she interrupted him and the dwarfling screwed his face up, ready to shout again. “You cannot have your father. He is not here. And he would be very shamed to see you dishonor your mother so with your fits. Babes weep and wail. Are you a babe?”

“ _No_ ,” Thorin said scowling even as his mother wanted to insist that of course he was. A little babe who only wanted his father.

“Then calm yourself.”

Thorin tried mightily to comply, sniffling and hiccoughing, his thumb coming into his mouth in the unconscious habit his mother knew she should break him of sooner rather than later. He lay his head against his grandmother’s shoulder and sighed in a morose way that reminded Freya so much of her husband that she had to swallow down a sudden rush of tears herself. As suddenly as the fit had come on, it was over and Thorin picked his head up and asked his grandmother hopefully, “Ride the ponies?”

Sigdís cocked her head at him, considering the question. “I don’t see that you deserve the privilege,” she said and his face fell. “Not unless you apologize to your amad for being so contrary.”

Thorin turned toward Freya and very solemnly said, “Sorry, Ama.” Then, looking back up at his grandmother asked again, “Ride the ponies?”

Hitching one shoulder in a shrug, Sigdís said, “That’s for your mother to decide. First you’ll need to see if she’s forgiven you.”

Freya nodded without hesitation; she knew how to pick her battles and refusing Thorin would merely result in more tears and screaming. Anyway, how angry could she be with him? She shared his feelings even if she could not condone his method of expressing them. “You’re forgiven,” she said and together they journeyed down to the stables where the horsemaster let Thorin sit upon the smallest of the ponies, leading him around in a circle until he was smiling and waving at his mother and grandmother every time he passed them, troubles forgotten.

If only his mother could be so easily consoled.

“His father was the same way,” the queen said, after a silence wherein the two only watched the dwarfling ride. “I’ll not have you thinking I’ve always had an easy time with children. Thráin shouted ‘til he was blue in the face when the menfolk left for war. And there’s naught you can say to comfort them, I don’t lie to my own. It might quiet them to hear their fathers will be back, but if he was never to return, I didn’t want my son growing up to think I was a liar.”

 _But your husband did come back and now your son is grown and gone,_ Freya thought to herself. Her mouth opened without her mind’s permission and she found herself saying aloud, “It’s not fair.”

“Ha!” Sigdis barked without humor. “If the world was a fair place, I’d have been leading armies and my husband would have been the one to mind Thráin. He’s got a way with wee ones I’ve never mastered. Natural talent. I had to apply myself to learning the art of it.” Smiling at Thorin as he made yet another circle around the paddock, she added, “Still not the best with soothing upset. At least the riding’ll get his mind off it.”

“I wish I could get my mind off it,” she said, staring at a spot in the middle distance. Freya could hardly believe she was being so honest with this paragon of dwarvish womanhood. Sigdís was a bit like the living embodiment of the mountain, tall, proud, strong and unbending - but even she admitted that she had faults, weaknesses. And if so great a personage could be so candid, then surely a little honesty on Freya’s behalf would not go amiss.

“Want to go riding?” Sigdís asked. When her daughter-in-law laughed, she said, “I’m entirely serious. No better cure for a troubled mind, save a fight or a hunt.”

“I’m not an adept rider,” Freya admitted. Few dwarrows were proficient with horses without hours of training and dedication; she was not so keen on the sport that she was willing to make the effort.

“Still better!” the Queen Under the Mountain insisted. “You’ll be so occupied trying to keep your seat that you’ll not have any concentration left to spare on our brave lads.”

Freya was saved the embarrassment of demonstrating her poor riding in front of one of the finest horsewomen in Erebor by the timely arrival of a messenger who informed the queen there were Elves at the door begging an audience.

Thorin tired himself out with riding and fell asleep on his mother’s shoulder when she carried him back to the interior of the mountain. Once inside, she discovered that the ravens had returned, bearing news of the dead. The ribbon they bore for Thráin was white as new snow. Alive, uninjured. Freya sagged with relief and nearly dropped her son. The royal messenger eyed her with something like disapproval. What would she have done if the ribbon was red or black? Fallen to her knees weeping? It was not behavior becoming of a dwarrowdam who ought to look upon a husband’s life-giving as the truest, best sort of sacrifice.

Freya had no care for scornful eyes and went on to her rooms to lay her son down. It would be a few weeks’ journey before Thráin returned, but she could bear it easily knowing that the misadventures of the road were nothing to fear. Now it was only the waiting. Now, when Thorin asked for his father, she could smile at him and say, _Soon he will return_ , as she kissed his brow and sang him to sleep.

Maybe, she reflected as she lay her son down to sleep in his cot, her mother-in-law’s advice on passing the time was worth heeding - as long as it did not involve her getting on a horse herself.

Distraction was what got her through the rest of Thráin’s absence, for both Thorin and herself. More than once she thanked the Maker for giving them little Dwalin since he and Thorin could occupy one another for ages while she had time to work on her own crafts. She apprenticed as a silversmith and close work was her specialty. She could manage heavy forging, but she lost herself for hours in carving intricate details upon jewelry and weaponry. She was very productive indeed when Thorin was at play and the court was away at war. Freya finished new bracelets for herself, her mother and her cousin, a new beard clasp for Thráin, new hair clasps for Thorin.

There was a change in the very air within the mountain. Losses had been very light indeed, the mothers, wives, and sisters of those who were returning set to work on their crafts and preparations were made for a great feast when the warriors returned him. Halldóra bustled around from the council chambers to the library and back again with the silliest smile on her face. Sigdís led a hunting party to the very borders of the Greenwood and there slaughtered enough meat to feed the dwarves of Erebor for days on end - though Freya suspected her overzealous nature had more to do with biting her thumb at the Elves who’d come to vex them the day the ravens returned.

The sight of her husband hale and whole with only a few fading bruises and half-healed cuts warmed her heart and inflamed her blood. When the feasting was done and Thorin long gone to sleep, she would have him all to herself once again. To claim him as her own in a way that neither their foes nor Death had managed yet.

* * *

Dwalin was the one who alerted Thráin that there was trouble under the mountain while he had been away. Reunited with his wife, parents and dear friends and kinsmen was welcome, but exhausting. He had been about to pass his young cousin back to his parents (Thorin refused to stop clutching his neck and both his arms were occupied with the children - he needed _one_ hand to eat) when the dwarfling said something that caught his attention.

“What was that?” he asked, straining to hear. Dwalin and Thorin were of an age, but Thorin was the easier of the two to understand by far and Thráin was certain that was not a father’s bias. Dwalin had his mother’s tendency toward quick speech, but none of Halldóra’s fluency.

“Ama fought-fighted Elfs,” he said, cheerfully with a smile dimpling his cheeks. “Auntie helped.”

“ _Elves_?” Thráin asked, raising his eyebrows at Halldóra who took her son back with a shrug.

“They’re long since gone - though I’d not be surprised if they come back with more complaints after your mother slaughtered half the forest creatures.”

“And if they do come back, we’ll send our finest mind out there to cut ‘em to shreds with that razor wit of hers,” Thrór declared, clapping his son on the back. “Come along, this is a night for celebration! We’ll let ‘em stew in their own juices for a few days and it’ll all blow over in the end, mark me. Tonight we feast!.”

There were days when Thráin wished for a measure of his father’s confidence in his rule and the strength of their kingdom. There were also days when he thought his father was too foolish for his own good, but he would never give voice to either thought. Instead, he smiled, somewhat wanly and looked down at his son. “Hungry?” he asked and when Thorin looked up, Thráin saw his thumb was in his mouth.

“Seems he’s started in ahead of us,” Freya said, guiding his hand down to rest at his side. Thorin curled it in his father’s beard instead and the three of them walked to the head table, though their son was fast asleep before the festivities could be said to have truly gotten underway.

Thráin’s mind was divided between the joy of the present moment and the fear of what tomorrow might bring. Elves to the gates with tedious interview and finger-wagging and demands that they veiled as advice, unasked for and always unheeded. They were the masters of Erebor and the surrounding lands, up to the borders of the Greenwood. They protected the earth and put its bounty to use, all benefitted from their rule, the Elves should be thanking them on bended knee, not chastising them.

For a race so long-lived, Thráin thought it strange that they would scorn the Dwarves their warfare. After all, foul things blighted the earth and had to be beaten back. In their long lives with their bows and swords the Elves had not wiped the pestilence from the world, yet they turned up their hairless chins and pursed their white lips, calling his people reckless. They knew not of what they spoke; true recklessness was to leave one’s halls and mines unguarded and to allow contamination to breed in the world unchecked. The Elves were welcome to their trees and welcome to let their helms rust and sword-arms grow wasted from misuse, but they would do well to keep their pale noses out of dwarrow affairs. Dwarves were a race apart; they owed allegiance to none save themselves.

Thráin’s mind was so preoccupied that he did not realize he and Freya were in their rooms until her hands were on his arms, tugging him toward the bedroom and unclasping his coat as she went.

“Your son’s not the only one who’s missed you,” she murmured and he saw a spark light in her blue eyes as she leaned in and kissed him.

Thráin’s blood could not catch fire. He was drawn taut as a bowstring, but it was with worry, not want. He pulled away and lay his fingers over her hands to stop her advances. Confusion overtook his wife’s beautiful features, then anger.

“Is it not so with you?” she asked, wrenching her hands out of his grip and folding her arms over her chest. “Will you not come to bed?”

“Not tonight,” he said regretfully, knowing she was losing her patience with his regrets. “Freya, if those Elves do mean to make trouble - ”

“They do not,” she replied, brows drawn together over her nose severely. Part of him wanted to kiss the lines on her brow until they were smooth, her eyelashes fluttering and mouth gone slack in pleasure, but he stamped the urge down. Business and duty were to be honored that night. Bodily pleasure would have to wait. “Didn’t you hear? Halldóra gave them a sound routing.”

“For the moment, aye, gone, but now that the king has returned, they will want him to give them answer.”

“If they do come, send them away!” she insisted. “It’s as your father said, now is a time for feasting and song.”

“If they do not respect our wars, they will not respect our feasts,” Thráin countered. Elves did not celebrate the spilling of blood, not even the black bile that ran in Orcish veins. Never would he understand Elves, but he must find some way to put aside his disdain of their customs to grant them an audience in a civil manner, if he was to be king. He was not gregarious and charming like his father, civility was all Thráin had to fall back on.

“ _Make_ them respect us,” Freya replied, mouth turning down in a sincere frown. “Refuse them an audience, if you must. Your father will sleep late on the morrow. And Halldóra as well, mark me. Fundin’s passion for her has not faded and they’ve been married fifty years. I’d have thought your ardor was just as strong, but it seems I was mistaken.”

Thráin reeled back as though struck, but he squared his shoulders and matched his wife’s sour expression with a scowl of his own. “That is unworthy. The Elves are our allies and we cannot slight them. If I put my duty before my marriage bed - _you_ should understand, a dwarrowdam of high birth. Halls above all else.”

“Halls and family,” Freya spat bitterly. “And you are one to talk of duty! Is it duty takes you away from me in the still of night to sit before a cold fire like some diviner, reading the future in the ashes? Tell me true, is it _duty_ keeps you from your marriage bed?”

Thráin had no answer he could make her. None that she would accept. Those nights she spoke of he knew well and loathed. Nights when his heart pounded as though it would break out of his chest and his mind reeled. The feeling he knew well from battle, but there was no one to fight in the darkness of his bedchamber, only his wife, a warm sleeping presence beside him. He could grow resentful, to see her so untroubled while he could not find respite in slumber. So he woke. He paced, he sat, he stared, too jittery even to work or read.

The morning could bring respite. When she used to join him of a night, even if he knew he would not sleep, his heart was eased somewhat to know she missed him enough to seek him out. Now she did not even do that. Thráin knew he should not feel resentful - why should his wife lose sleep over him? It would do neither of them any good? Yet it, in a small corner of his heart he could not deny it stung.

His silence vexed her. It always did. “Here’s a thought,” she said coldly and he knew whatever she was going to say, it would be cruel. “Mayhap Thranduil and his ilk would show us more respect if _you_ commanded it. Imagine, a king of Dwarves too cowardly to abide the displeasure of Elves.”

Thráin felt the sting of her words in his chest and in his gut. Their scribe was not the only member of the court with a tongue that could wound quick and deep. It was a quality Thráin deeply admired in his wife, her ability to see to the heart of the matter and cut through the blustering of others with a word or a glance. When her cunning was focused on him, though, he simply wanted to get away from her accusatory stare and voice like a cold winter frost in his ear.

So he did.

When Thráin returned later, scrolls in his arms detailing the treaties held between Erebor and Greenwood, Freya was nowhere to be seen. Abandoning the scrolls on a divan, he removed his boots to walk as quietly as he could to reassure himself that she was in bed. The bedchamber was dark, but the faint glow from the sitting room caught on her golden hair, splayed against the pillows and his heart ached with longing.

“You’re a fool,” he muttered to himself after he shut the door and returned to his scrolls. “An utter fool.”

The scrolls were rendered in the script of Erebor and the runes of the Elves. The words of their treaty were familiar to him as his own lineage, but reading the Elvish script made his eyes grow heavy and tired. As his luck would have it, this night when he required wakefulness, he slept soundly, roused only by the arrival of his son who found him a suitable substitute for his cot.

When he woke again, it was too a warm hand on his brow. At least, it seemed warm compared to the chill air around him. Blinking he vaguely discerned Freya’s outline in the darkness.

“The fire’s gone out. I thought you’d be sore if you stayed all night out here,” she explained and she did not seem angry anymore, just tired. She picked up Thorin, quilt and all and asked, wearily with the expectation of refusal, “Will you _please_ come to bed?”

“I will,” he replied. He could not make out her expression, but her shoulders slumped. Thráin knew that motion well, it was Freya’s peculiar version of relief.

He was in bed waiting for her when she returned from Thorin’s nursery and came close beside him beneath the blankets. His skin was bare and his hands stripped her sleeping garments from her, fumbling slightly with exhaustion and the blindness induced by nighttime.

“You left,” she whispered against his mouth when he held her to him and kissed her. “You left me again.”

“I came back,” he said, nuzzling his face into her neck beneath her beard.

“And will you always?”

The flesh of her face had a saltier tang to it than the rest of her body. Sweat? No, the night was cold. Tears, he realized and loathed himself for it.

“I’m yours,” he replied and covered his mouth with her own, his own words to his son playing over and over in his mind as he tried to banish overwhelm his treacherous mind with feel of his wife in his arms.

_I can’t promise you forever._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter coincides with Chapter 3 of the Balin-centric _A Good Man Goes to War_ , so read that chapter if you want to hear more about the event which shook Thrór so much - except don't, because it's horrible. The song Freya sings is "Turn of the Century" by Yes, it also made an appearance in _Bent, Not Broken_. 
> 
> Khuzdul Word of the Day - "inùdoy" means "son"

The library was dark and silent when Thráin eased his key into the lock and opened one of the thick, strong doors that separated the archives from the rest of the Hall of Records. In the dim light of only a few torches, it more properly resembled a temple on days of Remembrance than the usual hive of activity he knew it to be when the rest of the kingdom was awake.

Once again he could not sleep, but his worry had a source now: his father. Thrór was badly shaken by a crime, the sheer cruelty of which had shaken the whole Mountain. Thráin could hardly blame him, it was a ghastly, unspeakable act, a kinslaying over a necklace of pearls. The punishment was carried out to its fullest extent and he hoped to put the matter from his mind in time.

The first sign that Thrór was still terribly affected came when he requested Thráin bring him a complete inventory of all that was in the treasure room, collected as bounty, taxes, tributes, legacies, _all_ of it. At first, Thráin was wryly amused, for his father preferred to leave their accounts in the hands of himself and the Lord of the Coin entirely. Thrór, as he often claimed, was a king first, smith second, warrior third and mathematician...around thirty-seventh on the list of his most sterling qualities.

But there was a glint in his father’s eyes that stoppered any teasing comment on his son’s tongue. It was almost feverish. And Thráin remembered the look in the condemned dwarf’s eyes before his father put his axe to work upon him and a feeling of dread, as cold and piercing as any northern wind shuddered through him. His hands shook as he retrieved the ledgers and his mind had not been at ease since.

What his expectations were when he entered the library, he could not say. Was he seeking some balm for his worry? Or a confirmation of his worst suspicions? All he did know was that he wanted answers and this was the one place within the Mountain he could hope to find any. He hardly knew where to start looking, but it would not have done to come during the day when a dozen eager apprentices could have fetched the books he required for him. The information he sought was secret. He had not even spoken of his fears to his wife; he could hardly admit them to himself.

Some shuffling movement to his left made him jump and without thinking he removed a dagger from his belt holding it aloft. When he spun around, he found himself face-to-face with an unlit candelabra, aimed at his head.

“Durin’s beard!” the candelabra-wielder swore, setting it down on the table from which it had been plucked. “What do you mean, frightening me half to death?”

Halldóra. Of course. Who else would be flitting around the archives in the dead of night?

“To be fair, you startled _me_ ,” Thráin grumbled, sheathing his dagger. “What are you doing here so late?”

“I might ask you the same question,” she replied, folding her arms over her chest. That was unusual. Ordinarily, when he asked after one of her projects, the little scribe chattered his ear off for twenty minutes at a stretch about the particulars. The fact that she was being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about it boded ill.

The two of them stared one another down for a long minute before Halldóra sighed and said, “By Mahal’s celestial forges, you’re stubborn! We’ll be here all night. Either you go your own way and let me go mine or tell me what you’re looking for. I’m sure I can find the volumes you need a damned bit faster than you can.”

That was probably true, but Thráin was reluctant to speak the purpose of his visit to a single living soul. But this was _Halldóra_. A near kinswoman and his father’s most trusted advisor besides. Thráin would not put it past her to have suspected the meaning of his father’s odd behavior ages before he did - she was swearing a great deal, which usually indicated that she was out of sorts. When he hesitated again, Halldóra shrugged and walked past him to a table where several large books were stacked one on top of the other.

“Have it your own way,” she said, turning the spines away from him as she hefted them into her arms to be reshelved. “As it is, I’m on my way out. You’ll have the whole place to yourself, if you light a candle, pray don’t leave it burning all night. That's the last thing we need, I can just see it now, it'll fall over and the whole place will go up in flames! There’s been a bloody awful mouse problem - if I find out who it is been eating in here, I’ll wring their necks - ”

“What do you know of the Dragon Madness?” Thráin asked in a rush, before he lost his nerve.

Halldóra froze and let the books fall back on the table with an audible thump. She turned slowly to look at him and the candlelight reflected mournfully in her dark brown eyes. “Ah,” she said softly, eyes flickering toward the books on the table, then added, more to herself than him, “of course.”

Beckoning him closer with one ink-stained hand, she lifted a volume free from the pile she had been holding. “I know a great deal now,” she said, eyes flickering up at him over the tops of her spectacles before she lowered them to the book she held. “What would you like to learn about first? The kinslayings?”

She dropped a thick volume whose cover was blank, as though the binders thought the information it contained too vile to be stamped upon it for all to see. “The usurpations?”

Three more heavy tomes were placed beside the first. The dates written upon them were ancient, but the books themselves seemed nearly brand new. The spines were uncracked and the gilding on the pages was still intact. Rarely read, probably because they contained so much strife and unpleasantness. “Or the resulting wars?”

Seven books, each as thick as a dwarf’s sword arm, were last to be piled before him. These were much more frequently read, the pages were coming loose from their bindings in places.

They were innocuous things, books. At least, Thráin thought so, before that night. Now, confronted with those three stacks which spelled out only death and destruction for his line made him want to rage, but he held himself in check. He held his arms stiffly by his side, though his fingers itched to grasp the hilt of his sword and he swallowed down the screams of fury that threatened to emit from his throat. One could not kill knowledge with a sword, nor would railing against the truth force it to become any less legitimate.

“Is it always thus?” he asked, laying a hand atop the book of kinslayings, but not daring to open it. “Always?”

The scribe lay her small, more delicately boned hand atop his broader one and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Aye,” she said quietly. “Of all the books I’ve read and scrolls I’ve unfurled, it is...save one, which has a more hopeful outcome.”

Thráin had no way of knowing, but his expression of sheer, boyish hope was almost painful to behold at the minute. Halldóra’s grip upon his fingers tightened and he felt the press of the ring on his middle finger more sharply than those that surrounded it. “It isn’t much and bear in mind, it’s just the _one_ account that doesn’t turn out horribly - and that’s only because it stops before it comes to a proper ending.”

Releasing his hand, she moved away, disappearing into the darkness and returning with a scroll that was so old and so delicate that it had been mounted in several pieces between thin sheets of glass. “What is it?” Thráin asked, squinting down at the text with his remaining eye. It looked like it was rendered in the script of Moria, but upon closer inspection the runes looked arcane.

“I don’t know, not exactly,” Halldóra replied, fetching a candle and bringing it as close to the crumpling parchment as she dared. “There’s no attribution, nor credited scribe. Judging from the script and age of the parchment, I’d say it originated in the Iron Mountains. Likely from the First Age, before the War of Wrath. It’s...Thráin, dear, it’s really more a parable than a proper history.”

Thráin knew she was trying to let him down gently, to explain that it was nothing more than a fairy story, but if there was anything that might give him hope, he would leap at the chance to hear of it. “What does it say?” he asked. “I want to hear it.”

Taking a deep breath, Halldóra nodded and adjusted her spectacles on the end of her nose, “The early genealogy and line of succession is so worn away, it’s practically useless, but here’s the bit that will interest you, ‘...and the King was much stricken for the gold fever o’ertook his once-noble brow, making his skin ashen and his beard grey. His treasure house overflowed, but his people were hungry and their enemies were like wolves at the gate for all communion among the neighboring kingdoms had ceased. He ordered the gates of the mountain sealed that none could threaten what was his...’ there’s a few lines missing, but it picks up again as you’d expect, ‘And so there was great suffering.”

That sentence was a source of both comfort and fear to Thráin. Their gates remained wide open and their trade was flourishing with the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, the Men of Dale, the Elves of Greenwood and even far-flung lands beyond the Misty Mountains. His father was not so badly off that his...distraction risked harming their people. Not yet. Perhaps he never would.

“‘Finally, his son and heir would no longer bear witness to his father’s decline,’” Halldóra continued, ploddingly. Usually her voice was animated when she retold tales of their people’s history, but she might have been orating at a funeral for all the life in her tone. “‘He locked the doors of his father’s treasure house and stood before them as guard. In his hand he held a sword of mithril, whose scabbard was inlaid with jewels of every cut and hue, some as wide as a Man’s fist, others as small as a babe’s eye.’”

Upon reaching the end of the fragment, she picked up another plate, but lay it down after considering the text for. “This one just describes the sword and the scabbard, it’s not important,” she explained, reaching for the third plate. “Just know that he was armed and the scabbard was bejeweled and thus he waited. ‘He was not long to wait, for his father passed his days in the treasure house for many hours of his waking and sleeping.

‘The King stalked the corridors and when the Prince’s eyes met his father’s figure he raised his sword and spoke,’ - here’s where it gets a bit poetic - ‘“O! Unhappy he who would value gold above his subjects and his halls! If the ties of blood mean naught to thee, then blood shall be shed in the getting of that which thou holdst most dear!”’”

Thráin swallowed hard and steeled himself against what he surely knew would be the outcome of the confrontation. _The son will slay the father_ , he thought, half-numb with horror. _Or else the father will slay the son._ Abruptly, he thought of that gold-mad dwarf in the center courtyard, how he neither fought nor flinched when Thráin and Fundin made him extend his hands to be severed. What hope was there in such an ending? How dare Halldóra speak to him of hope?

“I thought so too,” she said, reading his thoughts in his expression. “But listen, ‘The Prince raised the sword and _threw it at his father’s feet._ Then, he unbelted the jeweled scabbard and lay it upon the floor before the doors to the treasure house. Regarding his father with eyes of deepest sorrow he so challenged him, “Take it, if thou wouldst.” The King took up the sword and was upon the Prince, his son, in an instant, but the lad did not stir. The mad King was poised to strike. The blade of the sword but kissed his son’s bare throat’ - by the Maker, he must have been _young_ \- ”

“Dóra, get _on_ with it,” Thráin growled at her through gritted teeth. The anticipation was getting to be too much to bear and making him ornery.

The scribe nodded, “Just so. ‘The blade but kissed his son’s bare throat and his father saw a droplet of blood well up, dark as a garnet against the shining silver. On seeing this, the King cast the sword away and fell to his knees, weeping.’”

“ _Then?_ ” Thráin prompted when she paused, at the end of his patience. “What then?”

“That’s all,” Halldóra said simply, placing the third plate down with its fellows. “That’s where it ends. I told you, it was a fragment.”

Thráin could have slammed the glass down in frustration, letting the shards pierce the parchment through and destroy it forever, but Halldóra placed the plates just out of his reach. Probably be design. “But what happened to the father and son?” he demanded. “Is there no further record?”

“There is, as it happens,” she said, gesturing to one of the books of war. “The father died in battle fifteen years later - in the Grey Mountains fighting a cold drake from the South, nothing to do with their kingdom at all, not as far as I could tell. The son succeeded him to the throne and ruled peacefully until the end of his life.”

Mind all awhirl, Thráin clung to the one solid fact Halldóra gleaned from her research. “They both lived, then?”

“Aye,” she nodded, running a finger over the cool, impassive surface of the glass. “But in what state I don’t know.”

So there it was. Tales of madness, hunger, war and death laid out in neat rows upon illuminated pages, hundreds of them. And one story of hope, half-complete, that might have been no more than a poetic ode. Thráin made a sound that was half a sigh, half a moan and lay his hands flat on the table in front of him, bowing his head and hunching his shoulders.

Halldóra moved to his side and reached up to place one slim hand against his far shoulder, laying her arm along his broad back. Thráin was not certain if he moved or she did, but before he could his mind could make an account of his body’s actions, he’d half folded himself against her and was weeping into her hair.

Small, she was, but strong as any dwarf and she bore his weight against her without complaining. Halldóra was older than him, but younger than his parents by decades. She caught his father’s attention with her skill as a scribe and married Fundin when Thráin was little more than a lad. He had no siblings of his own and so found in her a sometimes-friend, sometimes-sister. It was the sister he found he needed now and the sister’s role she filled, without needing to be asked.

Thráin did not shed tears for long. He released her and went to straighten up, but not before Halldóra leaned up on her toes and kissed his cheek gently. “What can I do?” he asked, even though he knew the answer already.

“Wait,” she said, drying her own tears and his with her sleeve. "Watch."

Halldóra turned away, stacking and carrying the books back to their proper place. Just before she disappeared into the darkness, she looked back at him, adding, “And, if you’re of a mind to, pray.”

* * *

Freya knew not what solace her husband found before a dying fire on a dark night. She herself could find no merit in it, wrapped as she was in her dressing gown, which was parted and pulled down over one shoulder so Frerin could nurse. Thráin had not come back to their rooms after suppertime. Thorin was sleeping in his bed and she made ready to put herself to sleep alone, but was saved from her solitude by Frerin’s wailing.

Once, she assumed all infants were very much the same, but Frerin and Thorin were different as opals and diamonds. Same black hair, same blue eyes, but vastly different tempers. She would not have said so at the time, but Thorin, who was content to lay back in his cot or else be held complacently, was _easy_ when compared to Frerin who always sought arms to hold him or a voice to speak and sing to him. That met with his grandparents’ approval, but Freya found him a trial.

Now, for instance, when his hunger was satiated, he still fussed in her arms. Replacing her robe and heaving a sigh, she got up to walk him around and around the sitting room, singing a song of lore - one of the longest she had memorized - in hopes that he’d fall asleep before the end.

“ _Now Roan, no more tears_  
 _Set to work his strength_  
 _So transformed him._  
 _Realizing a form out of stone_  
 _His work so absorbed him._

 _Could she hear him?_  
 _Could she see him?_  
 _All aglow was his room, dazed in this light._  
 _He would touch her, he would hold her._  
 _Laughing as they danced_  
 _Highest colors touching others..._ ”

In the middle of the song, the sitting room door eased open and Thráin appeared over the threshold, pausing. Freya was worried the activity would interest Frerin, but his eyes were heavy-lidded and his eyelashes brushed the tops of his cheeks, fat and hale. Thráin was well aware of his youngest son’s proclivity toward wakefulness and crept toward the fire as quietly as he could while Freya strode carefully up the stairs to lay Frerin down in his cot.

When she returned the flames licked higher and her husband was crouched before it, staring intently at the flames. “Coming to bed?” she asked, pointlessly. He would or he would not and her words made not the slightest bit of difference to him.

“Not tonight,” he said quietly, never looking at her for she stood on the side of his sightless eye.

Freya nodded tightly and turned on her heel to make her way toward the bedroom, but a plea, spoken in little more than a whisper from her husband stopped her. “Stay with me?”

Pausing, she turned again to regard him. This night his hunched posture seemed to invite company rather than repel it. Freya walked slowly to his other side and held out her hand. Thráin took it and let her pull him to his feet.

He did not lead her to the couch, as she expected, but to his usual armchair, closest to the warmth of the fire. Thráin sat and tugged her into his lap where she began unbraiding his hair. “Another grey,” she remarked idly. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“Nay, it isn’t that,” he said dully, his seeing eye staring straight ahead at nothing. “We’re a family that goes to grey early, a...taint in the line.”

Thráin’s voice caught strangely on the word ‘taint’ and Freya frowned at the top of his head. “It’s not so bad as that,” she said finally. “No shame in it. Makes you look rather dignified.”

Her husband had no response to make to that and she felt her frustration grow within her. He wanted her to stay with him, here she was, and he _still_ would not talk. “Are we to sleep at all tonight?” she asked lightly, trying to keep the annoyance from her voice.

“Just...stay a while,” he asked, looking up at her with such care and worry on his face the expression nearly took her breath away. “I won’t sleep, but if you could remain for a short time, I would have your company.”

 _Why?_ she wanted to demand. _What good does it do you?_

But she was tired herself, too tired to fight. Instead of shouting at him, she bit her tongue and nodded, brushing out his hair with her fingers since their combs were in the bedroom. Thráin’s hair was much more coarse than her own and her ministrations seemed to do more harm than good. “It’s a mess,” she muttered to herself.

“It isn’t, isn’t it?” he replied morosely.

Freya frowned and once again tamped down her frustration. “What’s wrong?” she asked bluntly. “What’s troubling you? What can I _do_?”

Thráin chuckled without mirth. “There’s naught to be done,” he said at last. “I was told to pray.”

“You want to go to the Temple?” Freya asked, confused. “At this hour?”

Thráin did not partake in religious observances outside of the required Holy Days. He did not cover his head or descend into the Temple regularly to hear their sacred texts recited aloud, nor did he light candles seeking guidance or for acts of thanks. He much preferred to make his own way without relying upon Divine favor. So it was now.

“Nay,” he shook his head.

“What do you _want_ , Thráin?” she asked, almost pleading herself. “Tell me what you want or I’m going to bed and leaving you. I’m too tired to listen to you talk in circles.”

“So don’t listen,” he said and she almost rose from his lap, but his arms tightened around her and urged her to stay. “Talk. I’ve hardly seen you. What did you do today?”

 _What did you do,_ she wanted to know, _that has you so out of sorts?_

Freya took a deep breath and held it. Then, she began to talk, “What did I do? I nursed your son, for the most part. Frigga visited before the midday meal and insisted that we go outside, despite the cold - she and Thorin engaged in quite the battle, armed with snowballs, you would have enjoyed watching that, I think. She’s quite good company for him, she has all the energy of a dwarfling and wore him out, he slept when we came in and you know how loathe he is to sleep during the day - you’re not listening, are you?”

“I am,” he said earnestly. “Thorin bested Frigga at war and passed out cold. Go on.”

Freya’s mouth twitched into a smile. “‘Bested’ might be a bit generous,” she informed him.

“If I want my son to have bested your cousin, best her he did.”

“If it cheers you,” she said, smiling sincerely. “Then, aye, it was a thorough victory. She limped away from the battlefield wet and chilled to lick her wounds with a mug of mulled cider. Once the lads were down, I had some time to myself.” Cocking her head down at her husband she continued, “A dwarf of our mutual acquaintance might find himself in possession of a fine new belt buckle tomorrow or the next day.”

“Might he?” Thráin asked musingly. Tilting his head up and looking into his wife’s eyes he said seriously, “Thank you.”

It was clear to Freya he was not talking about the belt. Again she wanted to ask what was _wrong_ , why he felt so unhappy, but the tension had eased from his shoulders. His arms embraced her, they did not grasp. Some of the desperation and misery eased on his face and her need to soothe his troubles won out over her desire to know what caused them. It was not always so, but this night she managed to provide her husband with some solace.

She spoke more about little nothings, a conversation she had with her mother, some half-ridiculous, half-charming thing Thorin said at supper. The king absented himself from court she remembered and it was on the tip of her tongue to inquire about him, but some sixth sense caused her to look up at the door leading down from their bedroom. It was ajar.

“That’s strange,” Freya frowned, moving out of her husband’s embrace. “I closed it.”

She certainly had, to keep the noise from penetrating up in the nursery so Frerin would sleep more than two hours together. Freya walked upstairs, giving the door a withering look as though it personally insulted her. Thráin followed close behind and the two noted at the same moment that there was a light on the nursery, most unusual for this hour.

When the peeked in, they were met with the sight of Thorin, standing on a stool, leaning over his brother’s cot. A candle was burning on his bedside table and the dwarfling looked up at the sound of his parents’ footfalls.

“Frerin was crying,” Thorin explained. “I went to fetch you, but you were talking. He’s better now.”

Upon drawing closer, they saw that one of Thorin’s hands was dangling down so Frerin could suck contentedly on his fingers. Freya’s smile broadened and she gave Thorin a kiss on the head before she took Frerin in her arms. “What a good brother you are,” she complimented him and the dwarfling beamed at the praise.

“Very generous,” Thráin nodded and Thorin’s smile became so broad, his mother thought his cheeks would ache with the force of it. “Now, back to bed,” he said, lifting Thorin off the stool and carrying him to his bed even though he thought his son too old for such treatment.

Thorin did not protest and scrambled beneath his covers, twisting them a little in his fingers as his father turned to go back to his room. “Kisses?” he asked hopefully.

Thráin very nearly demurred and Freya caught her breath, watching him. There was no particular age when it was assumed dwarflings would get to sleep without their parents’ tucking them in and bidding them good-night. Thráin was sure that they ought to be doing so by Thorin’s age, but his wife continued to indulge him.

 _Well, you won’t be putting him to bed and bidding him sweet dreams when he’s seventy,_ she reasoned.

 _I won’t,_ he agreed. _But you’ve got to put an end to it sometime._

“Very well,” he said, bending low and kissing Thorin on the forehead, hearing him giggle when his beard tickled his nose. “Good night, _inùdoy_.”

“Sweet dreams,” his mother added from the doorway. Thorin bid them a sleepy goodnight and Thráin remained for a minute, watching him, some of the heaviness that had been momentarily abated by his wife coming back in force now.

“Coming to bed?” Freya asked again, as hopeful as her son was when he begged a kiss.

Thráin could not satisfy her. “No,” he shook his head regretfully. “Not tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys! You guys! It's Good Daddy!Thráin again, what a treat! And he's _almost_ communicating with his wife! Is this going to last? No, but let's enjoy it while it happens. I hope you liked that and our journey into fake!dwarrow mythology.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter coincides directly with Chapter 4 of _A Good Man Goes to War_ and Chapter 2 of _Children of the Lonely Mountain_. Because I need to wring all the angst from this incident that I possibly can.

_I can’t do this._ All the worst and best moments of Thráin’s life revolved around that phrase. His first major battle that cost him his eye and nearly his life. The birth of his eldest son. And now, the betrayal of his father’s trust to save his people. The signet ring that donned the little finger of his father’s left hand lay heavy in Thráin’s palm, much heavier than its size implied. Much like the ring that he wore constantly on the middle finger of his own left hand. By contrast, his ancient adornment seemed lighter than usual.

Thrór left his ring, carrying the seal of their house, abandoned in his private chambers. Instead he wore a ring of gold in its customary place, inlaid with a blood-red garnet. His father wore his jewels like armor in these dark days, but all the gold and silver in the world could not guard against corruption from within. It had been so easy to take it from his bedside table, it hardly felt like stealing at all. Thráin had a key to his parents’ apartment and he walked in as naturally as you please to the empty rooms.

His father was in the treasure house and his mother had taken the swiftest mount in their stables and, if Thráin knew her at all, was searching the borderlands with her sword and bow for something to kill to work out her rage. Just the day before she asked if he wanted to join her, but he refused. She was frustrated by her impotence, her inability to change her husband’s mind by force, but Thráin’s fury was not directed at what he could not do, but what he must do.

 _I can’t do it,_ he thought again. The ink glittered wetly upon the parchment in the light of the single candle that seemed to cast more shadows than it illuminated.

“If you’ve changed your mind,” Halldóra spoke quietly, keeping her eyes down. “You’d best do it now. Fundin doesn’t have guard duty tonight, he wouldn’t be the one to make the arrest. Grant me that small mercy anyhow.”

Thráin looked down at her and swallowed hard. She’d played her part, more boldly than he, but no less unwillingly. The name upon the parchment might have been written by his father’s own hand. She’d even remembered to retain his usual downward slant; Thrór always signed his official papers in haste, eager to be done with the tedium and move on to surveying his lands and bounty, seeing to his subjects, training the guard. Only now he halted all that and sealed himself with his treasure, giving not a tinker’s damn for how his action - or _inaction_ might seal his doom.

Seal. Thráin diverted his attention from brave little Halldóra to the ring in his palm. His fist tightened around it and he breathed out hard, as though he had been pierced by the hot metal. “I would not,” he began, but stopped himself and said, “I _cannot_. This must be done. For our people’s sake and for his.”

_I can’t do this. People will go hungry. I can’t. I must._

The stick of wax grew warm and turned liquid in the candle’s flame. Thráin saw himself place the hot red wax upon the parchment, saw it glisten like an open wound. Then he drove the seal into it, at once the noblest thing he’d ever done and the most treacherous. He pressed the seal hard against the wax.

 _We, the undersigned_ **Thrór, son of Dáin, King Under the Mountain**

** Gendron, Lord of Dale **

_Witnessed by_ **Thráin, son of Thrór**

Thráin managed to lift the ring from the parchment and pocket it before his legs would no longer hold him and he crashed to his knees before the table. Tears burned at his remaining eye, but he would not let them fall. Grieved he was, but angry too, so angry that he should be reduced to this by this father’s infirmity.

Halldóra came up close beside him and stroked his hair in a motherly fashion. Blindly, he reached for her and drew her into his arms, bowing his head against her coat. His heart was beating so hard, he thought he might be sick, but she held him in turn. He felt her slender form shudder in his arms and tears fell from her eyes and soaked his greying hair.

“We did what had to be done,” she whispered to him, a sob catching the last word and making her voice tremble. “We did what had to be done.”

They held one another until the candle burned low and the wax hardened. Then Thráin pulled away and got to his feet, feeling as old as the mountain itself. “You will take this to the archives,” he said. They were words he spoke every day, but they felt like a mockery. As though he were merely a player acting out his own life upon a stage.

Halldóra nodded briskly, drying her eyes and playing her role as well. “Aye, I will. It’ll be taken care of.”

Blowing out a breath, Thráin turned to go and had no intention of looking at the parchment, but it shifted as Halldóra rolled it up and that false signature caught his eye. “Dóra,” he began uncertainly. “My grandfather...he was not afflicted?”

All the bravery and stoicism she gathered around herself fell away. Her face crumpled and her eyes filled with tears again as she replied, “Your grandfather died young.”

With feet like lead, Thráin trudged through the halls of Erebor, keeping to the little-used pathways and alleyways on his way to replace his father’s ring. Not a thief. A prince regent, merely stepping in to take care of the little particulars for a king who was indisposed. His father would come back to himself, Thrór was strong, stronger than any malady of the mind.

His first thought when he stepped into his parents’ bedchamber was that a burglar _had_ been on the premises, clothes and jewels littered the floor, the bed, drawers were pulled out and overturned. Thráin’s heart leaped into his throat and did not calm its rapid beat when he saw his father standing in the middle of it, with the most disturbing expression on his face. Thrór did not look angry, not anymore. He looked lost.

Thrór noticed his son a half-second after Thráin spied him. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, eyes darting wildly around the room, as though expecting her to spring from some shadowy corner.

“Hunting,” Thráin replied warily, coming a few steps closer. His father’s crown, his chain of office, his outer robes were all fallen on the floor in a heap. Half-dressed in his tunic and trousers, he seemed smaller than before, and older. “Are you looking for something?”

“My ring,” was the reply and before Thráin could inquire ‘Which ring?’ his father started in again. “My signet ring, I don’t know where it could have gone, I don’t remember taking it off - I don’t remember where I placed it - Dísa’s gone hunting, has she? I don’t remember her saying so.”

“She left two days ago,” Thráin told him carefully. There were dark circles beneath his father’s eyes and he looked wan. How long had it been since he’d slept? Since he’d eaten? “I...well, you know what she’s like. I’m sure she only mentioned it to me because we crossed paths as she was heading out the door.”

“Did you tell me?” Thrór asked, seizing Thráin’s hand and peering searchingly up into his son’s face. “You’re good about those things. Did you?”

_I tried. I couldn’t find you._

“It must have slipped my mind,” he said, swallowing hard. His skin felt hot all over, but his head was swimming. _You mustn’t be sick. You mustn’t be sick._

  
With numb fingers, he took his father’s hand in both of his. Thrór had lost weight these past weeks; the ring slid on easily. With a shaky laugh, a pitiful facsimile of the hearty chuckles Thráin was accustomed to, his father said, “Well, I suppose I don’t blame you. Don’t know where my mind’s been, all my thoughts are scattered - if only I could find that thrice-damned _ring_ that would be something - “

“It’s right there, Adad,” Thráin said, his heart pounding so hard he thought it might burst from his chest. “Right there on your finger.”

Thrór froze. Lifted his hand. His lips parted in helpless disbelief and he made an aborted gesture toward his brow, as though he wanted to drop his head in his hands and become the very image of despair, but thought better of it. “So it is,” he said and made his way swiftly to the door. “I’m taking a walk.”

Thráin gestured vaguely to the mess on the floor, “Shall I summon the servants?”

“Leave it. It’ll give me something to do.” Thrór turned back toward his son and smiled at him weakly. “If I straighten my own room, I’ll have a better idea of where my things are, eh?”

 _Your grandfather died young._ Thráin heard it again, like a ringing in his ears and heard too all that Halldóra left unspoken. _There is no way of knowing whether he was afflicted. Or whether you will be afflicted. Or your children._

In the end, he did have to call for the servants. Not to tidy his father’s room, but because Thráin himself hardly made it two steps out of the apartments, waiting just long enough that he was not on his father’s heels, before his body could no longer contain all the bile he’d swallowed down over the last few days and he was violently sick.

* * *

Someone had to say something. It was unprecedented for the King Under the Mountain to disappear for three days together, but now the Queen had gone off into the borderlands and who knew when they would hear from her again? These last few years, Freya felt the life she had claimed for herself slowly, but surely slipping away from her by inches, like a leaf, dying in the autumn months. It would shrink, curl back into itself and grow so brittle that it crumpled away to dust at the lightest touch.

When was the last time she remembered being truly happy or content? Not since the days following Dís’s birth. What a blessing, the first girl born to the line of Durin in two generations! There had been feasting for days, gifts of gold, silver and mithril came to them from all Seven Kingdoms. Thráin’s spirits were as high as she had ever seen them, she was sure he had not doted so much over their sons as he did to this tiny, black-haired girl, named for his mother in the hopes that she would inherit some of the Queen’s ferocity.

When was the last time she had seen her husband smile? When was the last time he spent any time with their children, apart from Thorin? When was the last time he had slept more than a few hours together?

Not since his father disappeared. Longer. Since his father began to fade away from them all. Freya noticed it weeks ago, a hardening in the King’s eyes, his laughter was to be heard less and less. He did not join them at supper and her mother-in-law grew worried while her husband fretted and took on more and more work to supply for his father’s absence. All the while no one spoke a word of censure about Thrór or, indeed, mentioned his name at all.

When he called the small council session three days before, Freya was relieved, but it was a short-lived joy for her husband returned to their rooms silent and troubled, speaking not a word to her all night. Frerin asked, earlier, why his father had not been at supper, but Thorin knew not to ask now. Her solemn boy was hard at work, nose pressed to a clean sheet of parchment as he dutifully copied out Elvish runes. Frerin was nearly asleep on his parents’ bed, determined to stay up until his father returned and doing a dismal job of it.

The baby Freya held in her arms, memorizing the way dark eyelashes fluttered against round cheeks. In contrast to Frerin, she felt she hardly spent any time at all with her daughter when she wasn’t feeding her. Everyone wanted a chance to hold her, to stroke her soft hair or kiss her tiny forehead, letting her little hands curl around their fingers. Girls were much valued among their people and this particular girl had been a long time coming. Little wonder she was so much sought-after.

But there was no time to fall in love with her daughter for her husband walked in, looking like a ghost of himself. Thráin’s face was almost as grey as the silver that threaded through his beard and he seemed shaken, his gaze taking them all in with something like alarm in that dark blue orb. Thorin looked up from his schoolwork and chanced a smile at him, but his father looked away, under the pretense of shucking his coat and belt off.

Watching her eldest son’s face fall into neutral concentration as he pressed his nose closer to the parchment, Freya decided she’d had enough. “Have you seen your father?” she asked sharply, rising from the chair she had been sitting in as Dís’s head fell back to rest in the crook of her arm.

Thráin was placing his clothes in the laundry and for a furious instant she thought he was going to ignore her. Freya preferred not to rage at her husband in front of their children, but only Thorin was awake now, old enough to learn from his father’s mistakes. Fortunately, Thorin responded before his wife had to say something rash.  
“I did,” he replied, removing his rings - save the one, ever-present on his left hand - and lining them up on the vanity in a line, like warriors preparing a charge.

“And?” she prompted him, closing the neck of her tunic with one practiced hand. “Will you not speak to him?”

Thráin inhaled deeply, as if there wasn’t enough air in the room to breathe by. “I have _tried_ ,” he rumbled, jaw clenched and teeth gritted. “Do you not believe I’ve tried? He seeks no one’s counsel save his own.” Turning back to look at his wife, Thráin folded his arms over his chest and adopted the sort of haughty, disinterested voice he employed when speaking with impertinent commoners. “As he is our king, that should be enough.”

Enough? Freya balked inwardly and rubbed at her eyes with one hand in agitation. The baby she placed in the cradle and thank goodness for his daughter, otherwise she might have taken her husband by the shirt and given him a rough shake to knock some sense into him. Even with Dís in her arms, it was a near thing.

“I respect him as my king,” she said slowly. If Thráin was going to hide behind his courtly demeanor, she could do the same with impunity. Not like their Queen with her burly arms and towering height, but Freya had her own strength. Words like daggers. Eyes that froze the objects in her gaze. If their Queen was stone, their Princess was ice and both were hard and immovable. “But I love him as my father-in-law and I worry for him as I would a father.”

“And do I not worry?” Her husband’s voice was losing some of its detachment and he was turning that ring over and over again, in a habit she wished she could break him of. A switch across the knuckles, a brand against his skin, by the Maker, she would have his hands off if he would just stop toying with that awful _ring_. “Do I seem complacent to you? He is _king_ and I am his son. If he shuts his ears to me and bars the doors of his treasure room, what can I do, but obey? It would be treason to do anything else.”

 _Mayhap we could do with a bit of treason around here._ The words were on the tip of her tongue and she nearly gave voice to them, but Freya snapped her jaw shut and thought better of it. Treason was a filthy word and a filthier crime. To joke about such a thing was in such poor taste, she thought her husband’s noble brow would crack with shock. Perhaps it would do him well to suffer a shock. It might lift him out of his dreadful inaction at last.

“You find my answers inadequate.”

“I find your _actions_ inadequate,” Freya snapped back, eyes flashing dangerously. “And your answers inane.”

She did not even need to speak of treason, she found, to disconcert Thráin utterly. Her mouth curved in a mocking smile of triumph as he stalked across the room and took her arm roughly. Freya looked her husband fully in the face and froze herself, momentarily perplexed by what she saw there. Even as he shouted at her about patience and recovery, demanding to know what she would have him do, it was not anger she saw that wrinkled the flesh of his brow or tightened his mouth. It was grief.

Wrenching her arm from his grasp, completely thrown, Freya looked away, forcing herself to look at the stone wall of their chamber rather than her husband’s sorrowful expression. “With every passing year we wait longer and longer for him to come back to himself,” she said and Thráin might have stormed out, might not even be listening to her, but she would speak. All the worry and the heartache and the frustration she had been bottling up for nearly a decade came pouring out of her. “No one says a word! Whether out of loyalty or fear, I don’t know. I don’t _care_ either, for something must be done. Surely you see that!”

Freya whirled around to face her husband, but he was master of himself again. Like his mother, he was stone and his expression betrayed nothing but cold disapproval. “What I see,” he said and his voice was like winter, “is a noblewoman who does not honor her king.”

Without thinking, she flew at him and now took him up by the front of his shirt, wrenching him down so their brows were less than an inch apart, a mockery of a dwarven embrace. “How _dare_ you?” she spat furiously. “How _dare_ you speak to me of honor? My father died in the service of his liege-lord and did not live long enough to see his daughter marry and you would accuse me of disloyalty?”

Thráin pulled away from her, smoothing his shirtfront over and over again, but at least he’d stopped twisting that ring. “Stop...” he began, but seemed not to know what he wanted her to cease doing. “I am sorry. Forgive me.”

“I don’t understand you,” Freya shook her head and let the words of apology slide over her like rainwater down a pane of glass. “I don’t think I ever have. One minute you’re practically accusing me of...of _treason_ and the next you want my forgiveness?”

“Stop, don’t...” Thráin breathed out hard through his nose and folded his arms, hunching his shoulders as though he was trying to ward off a sudden chill. “That word, I don’t...I was _wrong_. It wasn’t you who - _I_ am the one who needs to be forgiven. So I ask you to forgive me. Please.”

A horrible dawning realization stole over her and Freya herself felt a chill run up and down her spine as she took in her husband’s defeated posture. All this time she’d been railing at him to take action...

“Oh, Thráin, what have you done?” she asked breathlessly.

“Do not ask me such things, I won’t answer you,” he shook his head and Freya felt her ire dig its way up her spine, claws of malice in her back.

“You never have words for me,” she glowered at him and Thráin must have felt it for he turned and looked at her wretchedly. “All the time you prefer saying nothing to speaking something that bodes ill. Why? Do you not trust me?”

Thráin took another shuddering breath, steeling himself as if for a blow. His fears were not unfounded for he laid hands upon his wife, broad palms resting on her shoulders while his fingers dug into her tunic. She felt the sweat on his palms dampen her skin even through the thick wool. “I trust you,” he said slowly, “to understand that it was necessary. And terrible. And that I cannot speak a word about it.”

Freya saw his grief again and his fear. Without knowing what to do, she lay her hands upon his forearms, squeezing the muscles that were as tight and hard as steel beams. “Are you in danger?” she pressed him. “Are _we_ in danger? The children?”

And then Thráin collapsed against her, his head fell and their brows were pressed together so tightly it was as though he was trying to become one with her. Despite her anger, Freya could not deny her love and wrapped her arms around her husband’s middle. Regardless of his bulk, from the way he shook in her arms, he felt as insubstantial as mist.

“Do not speak to me of the children,” he whispered. “I cannot know.”

He was weeping, she realized. Hot droplets fell into her eyes and mingled with her own tears to carve tracks down her cheeks. No, she thought as she held her husband, so proud, so stern, so forthright. She did not understand him at all.

They broke apart when the door of their room opened and there beheld Thrór holding Frerin tucked up on his shoulder, head lolled in slumber and one hand wrapped around a thick grey braid. Freya blinked, startled. But Frerin had just been lying on the...

Their bed was vacant. So too was Thorin’s seat at his father’s writing desk. And the cradle was empty.

“I’ve come to deliver a few parcels,” Thrór remarked, so much like himself that Freya’s head was spinning. Thorin stood beside his grandfather with his eyes downcast, bearing his youngest sibling in his small arms. “They were taken to Balin’s room by mistake.”

No one laughed or even smiled. Thorin handed his little sister to his mother and made for the nursery with a softly voiced, “ _Good night_.” Thrór gave Frerin over to Thráin and the little boy was so exhausted that he did not wake with the jostling.

The baby slept on, peaceful and unperturbed. Freya envied the infant her innocence, but more than that, wished that she could lock her away under lock and key to preserve it forever. She wished she could shield all those she loved from hardship, but it was impossible and too late besides. She knew from his retiring manner and uncertain expression that Thorin had seen too much of unhappiness already.

Behind her, Thrór and Thráin spoke quietly over Frerin’s head.

“I meant to ask,” Thrór said. “The trade agreement...it’s settled then, I signed it, didn’t I? I remember _that_ at least.”

The air was thick all of a sudden, heavy with an unspoken secret. “You did,” Thráin said carefully, shifting his hold on Frerin, slightly away from his father. “It’s...all well in hand.”

“Good, good,” Thrór nodded distractedly. “A renewal of last year’s terms, wasn’t it? Too bad we won’t be seeing a surplus, but things could always be worse, couldn’t they?”

Abruptly the tense feeling lifted. It was like breathing fresh air again after being shut away in a box. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the set of her husband’s shoulders loosen for the first time in days. Whatever it was he had to do, she forgave him instantly. For the moment, at least, all was well. Perhaps her husband would sleep that night and that was worthy enough cause for any crime.

“Aye,” Thráin agreed with a touch of melancholy. “Things can always get worse.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started writing this, I thought it was going to just be the story of a pleasant outing for the Durin family. It wound up being an outing, whether it's pleasant or not is for you folks to decide. The tragedy that Dís and Frerin are quoting is _Hamlet._

The most infuriating thing about Thráin - and there were _many_ infuriating things about Thráin - was his ability, when the rotation of the planets was just so, when the moon cast just the right amount of light upon the surface of the earth and when the air, temperature, mood and generally cycles of life in their mountain city ran perfectly in accordance with one another, he could be absolutely wonderful.

There were good days that made the bad weeks bearable. Long afternoons where he drilled the lads upon the training grounds with his eye on skill and his heart inclined to favor their pride. When Thorin, who always worked himself to panting exhaustion when his father was watching, received a pat on the shoulder and a, ‘Well fought,’ for his hours of effort. Those days, so few and precious in number, when he would laugh at his father’s good-natured teasing and fond embraces, give in to his mother’s cajoling to go for a long ride in the lands surrounding the Mountain and when the time for sleep came, he saw his youngest children off to bed and joined his wife in their own chamber and Freya slept in his arms for the whole of the night.

It could not last, it never did and after almost sixty years of marriage, Freya knew that it would not be long before some cog ceased to turn in her husband’s mind, or some report of unrest in the East, South, or West would reach him, or his father would seem to slip and take his son down with him. It could not last, but she did her damnedest to enjoy those good times when she could. There was no escaping the marriage after all; when she vowed ‘until death’ she meant it quite literally.

Though she had accepted her husband’s bouts of frustrating melancholy were inevitable, that did not been she hadn’t stopped trying to stave them off as long as she could. Now she had a little bargaining chip on her side and she was not afraid to employ it liberally.

Whether time or experience had done it or they were simply two kindred souls, Thráin could almost always be counted on to pick himself out of a bad humor for Dís’s sake. Thorin had always been a quiet child, easy to please and undemanding, not the sort to cling to his father’s coatskirts and beg to be lifted onto his shoulders or cuddled or played with. If Thráin did not approach Thorin with an offer to spend time together, it was unusual for Thorin to request it. Frerin was exactly the opposite, he threw himself on his father at every opportunity, demanded to be entertained and _howled_ when he did not get his way. Thráin found him a trial to deal with and often deposited the boy on his bed, or in his mother’s arms or, when he was truly desperate, in his parents’ apartment since Thrór and Sigdís were enormously fond of the little monster.

Dís, it seemed, had worked out the way into her father’s heart without any great effort in fewer than twenty years of life. Freya might have been jealous if she wasn’t so relieved. The little lass would toddle up to her father once she could walk, arms raised over her head in silent expectation. She would come to him with a toy or book in one hand, the other reaching out to tug his trouser-leg or bootstraps with a smile on her face and, unless there was truly pressing business to attend to, Thráin indulged her, almost without fail.

And when she occasionally happened to find her father sitting alone before a dying fire or at his desk with his head in his hands, Dís would walk over and sit by him, occupying herself quietly on the rug until he happened to glance over and inquire what it was she was doing.

The first girl born to Durin’s direct line in three generations. The juzral took it as a sign that their house was favored, but Freya was taking it as a sign of the Maker’s mercy. At last a soul had been Made that could bring her husband a little light.

She found them sitting together at Thráin’s desk, he was working with pen and ink while Dís scribbled on a piece of parchment with her fist wrapped around two sticks of colored wax. Her tongue poked out of the side of her mouth as she worked, she seemed to be concentrating very hard on her task. Her father was similarly engrossed and neither looked up until Freya rapped her knuckles upon the top of the desk to get their attention.

Dís grinned at her, face smudged with color, hair falling out of their plaits - fine hair, her children had, a legacy of her husband’s line and one that she did not take as much pride in as their prowess on the field of battle. The little girl held her masterpiece aloft and announced, “For you!”

“Thank you,” Freya said, glancing the picture over. It was a multicolored series of blobs, surrounded by some of the black charcoal that was all over her daughter’s face.

“Tell her what it is,” Thráin bade his daughter, not looking up from the parchment he was studying.

“Er’bor,” Dís informed her promptly. She then launched into an explanation of the various corners of the city that were represented on the paper, though her speech was not as fluent as it might have been. Freya caught something about their own house, the throne room, the warriors’ grounds, the forges before she cut her off, holding her arms out to lift Dís off her father’s lap.

“Very good,” she said, removing a handkerchief from her sleeve, trying to remove some of the ink, but it only smudged and the tickling of the cloth prompted her daughter to sneeze all over her.

Thráin looked up from his work at long last, just in time to see Freya pull a thoroughly un-regal expression as Dís wiped her nose on her sleeve. The hand that went over his mouth hid his smile, but didn’t muffle his laughter as much as he might have hoped. Although Freya liked to see her husband laugh, she preferred when his mirth was not found at her expense.

“Sorry, Ama,” Dís sniffled as her mother wiped her face with her handkerchief.

“That’s alright,” she said, shooting a mildly threatening glare at her husband who turned his chuckling into coughing. “I don’t mind the sneezing, but I do mind the _dawdling_ , if you’re forgotten - ”

“OUTING!” Frerin burst in then, half-dressed and bouncing around the room like a whirlwind. “Outing, outing, outing, outing, OUTING!”

“Were we doing something today?” Thráin asked, ignoring Frerin until the lad threw himself in front of his father.

“OUTING!” he shouted, tugging on the end of Thráin’s beard until his father battered his hands away.

Somehow, a request by Freya’s mother-in-law to get little Dís on ponyback had turned, by word of mouth and her father-in-law’s preference for large gatherings, into the whole family indulging in an afternoon spent out of doors in summer sunshine. Unlike her in-laws, Freya much prefered days spent under rock to sweating and squinting in the heat, but the children seemed universally tickled pink by the idea and it seemed in bad taste to bow out and refuse.

“Where’s your brother?” Thráin asked, taking Frerin by his shoulders until he stood on his own two feet - his own two _stocking_ feet. “Where are your boots?”

“Thorin went ahead to find Dwalin - and _he_ hid my boots so I’d not follow him,” Frerin pouted.

“How do you know he hid them?” Freya asked, shifting Dís onto her other hip, impatient to be gone.

“Because I found them under his bed,” Frerin replied promptly.

“Why aren’t they on your feet, then?”

The boy didn’t seem to have a very good answer, and so his parents ordered him to finish dressing, otherwise he would be left behind. That threat made him scarper as nothing else had and with a roll of her eyes, Freya left her husband, telling him that she would be back in no more than five minutes or they would be leaving without _him_ as well.

It promised to be a good day. Thráin was waiting by the door when Freya emerged from the washroom with Dís, having managed to get the worst of the color off her face. Frerin was there as well, running with his boots unlaced. Thráin dropped to his knee to get the task done for him, mumbling about the waste of time, but there wasn’t any gall in his voice. It the day was going to sour for him, the time was a long way off, the fact that he’d not immediately buried himself in work once his wife left, happy to suffer being left behind, was a very good omen for the rest of the day’s progress - if only they could get out the bloody door.

They weren’t the only ones running late. Their home was directly beside the house Fundin shared with his wife and the two of them emerged from the door as one - quite literally. Halldora was slung over her husband’s shoulder like a sack of grain.

“Morning,” Fundin greeted them cordially.

“Late start?” Freya asked as if there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary afoot.

“Aye,” he nodded, looking over his shoulder at his wife’s face, smiling blandly. “Took a bit of doing to convince her we couldn’t carry the writing desk along with us.”

“Oh, let’s not mince words - you _could,”_ Dóra said, a trifle irritated by the sound of it. “You just chose not to.”

Fundin didn’t say a word, but he put his wife down and suffered a disgruntled look as she tossed her hair and gazed slightly longingly at their closed door. Honestly, Freya thought with a buzz of annoyance, it was a good job she’d snatched up Thráin and Fundin had married Dóra. If it had been the other way round, she was quite certain that the crowned prince and court scribe would never leave their studies.

Dís wiggled in her mother’s arms, impatient to be put down. Once Freya set her on her feet, she bounced up and down, arms raised, eager to be picked back up. Only the object of her affection had shifted. “Dóra! Dóra! Dóra!” she shouted, running toward the scribe.

Dóra’s eyes lit up and any regrets she might have had about being carried away from her work seemed to evaporate in an instant.

“Missus Dóra, if you must,” Freya reminded Dís, but Dóra was indulgent with the children to a fault.

“Oh, that’s alright,” she said, scooping the little lass up and setting her on her hip, covering her forehead in little pecking kisses. “How fare you today, lassie?”

“On the cam-eee-lion’s dish,” Dís replied promptly with a very broad smile. “I eat the air!”

Dóra and Fundin both laughed. Freya had no idea what was so funny, nor why Dis had made such a ridiculous reply to a perfectly ordinary question (also, she had no idea what a ‘camelion’ was), but her husband seemed to understand the joke, even if he did not share the mirth.

“Have you been reciting tragedies to my daughter?” he asked as the band made their way to the Gate.

“Not the choicest bits,” she assured him. “I save that for when they’re a mite older - isn’t that so, Frerin, dear?”

Frerin ran a few steps ahead, brandishing an invisible sword before him.

“A rat! A rat!” he cried, then plunged his imaginary dagger into his own breast. With wide eyes and his mouth comically agape, he squeaked out, “O! I am slain!” and fell panting to the floor.

Fundin crouched down and picked the lad up, much in the manner he must have done earlier with his wife. One-armed he hoisted the lad onto his shoulder and continued on his way. Freya thought she should thank him for his troubles; saved her the bother of stepping around him, anyway.

“Doesn’t the son kill his father in that one?” Thráin asked and finally Freya felt the clouds lift from her mind when she recalled which play her children were reciting lines from; a Stonefoot tragedy about a slain king and a vengeful son, not one of her particular favorites.

“Nay, the son avenges his father’s murder,” Dóra replied before Freya could correct Thráin’s mistake. “Done by his uncle and as you’ve no brothers, you’re quite safe on that count.”

“If you meet a bad end, the wee ones’ll avenge you,” Fundin said with a smirk and a pat on Thráin’s shoulder.

“I hope they’re quicker about it than the melancholy prince,” Freya interjected. “I seem to recall two hours of soliloquies before he finally got round to doing anything about it, I was bored to tears.”

“But it did make you cry,” Dóra winked. “And so was a very successful tragedy.”

The adults spent the rest of the walk debating the state of modern tragedy as a whole while the children were contented to leave the walking to someone else. At least until they neared the Gate and Thorin and Dwalin descended on them, champing at the bit to get going.

“Carried all the way?” Dwalin asked, running around to his father’s side to look at Frerin. “Feeling poorly? Not so keen to mount a horse as you were last night?”

“I’ll have you know, I just died a most glorious death,” Frerin retorted as Fundin set him back on his feet.

“Aye,” Fundin nodded, righting Frerin and straightening his coat. “Fell on his own sword.”

“But it was glorious!” Frerin insisted, throwing his arms in the air and whirling around in circles.

Fundin smirked at him and ruffled his hair, sending the fine, fly-away strands all out of arrangement. “Aye, that it was.”

“Must you?” Freya groaned, attacking Frerin’s head with the small silver comb she always kept on her person for such emergencies. “He does enough damage on that front without aid.”

“But once he’s in the saddle the wind’ll do the damage all over again,” Dwalin pointed out, sounding altogether too smug for his age, nevermind that he was taller than all assembled save Thráin and his father.

Freya brandished the comb at him threateningly, “That’s no excuse not to look well in the meantime - and you watch your back, if I find an obliging rock to stand on, it’ll be _you_ next.”

Dwalin brought his hands up over his head and cowered while Thorin laughed. Freya’s eldest son ambled over to his sister and Halldóra with his arms outstretched.

“Want to come with me?” he asked Dís hopefully. “I’m a better mount - taller anyway.”

Usually the enticement of having someone tall and strong to carry her about would pry Dís loose from anyone she’d attached herself to, but she clung to the scribe’s neck and shook her head; evidently Dóra was her chosen playmate for the day. Dóra seemed all too pleased by that arrangement, she kissed the top of the lassie’s head and shrugged at Thorin, attempting to look apologetic.

“I’ll give her over when she’s sleepy and grumpy,” Dóra promised; Freya raised her head from Frerin’s braids and laughed.

“You’ll give her to him, then he’ll give her to me,” she predicted. “She only ever wants her amad when she’s cross.”

“Balin was the same way,” Fundin reassured her. “Only he wanted _me_ when he was out of sorts.”

“I beg your pardon,” a wryly amused voice spoke up behind Fundin’s back. The warrior turned slightly, revealing Balin standing behind him with his arms folded. “I am _never_ out of sorts.”

Dwalin and Thorin let out great hoots of laughter and led the way out of the gates.

“That’s as big a lie as I’ve ever heard!” Thorin declared. “You could give Uncle Gróin a run for his money some days!”

Even Thráin laughed at that.

“Uncle _Gróin?”_ he asked, incredulously as they emerged into the hot summer sunlight. “That’s as harsh a judgment as I’ve ever heard - and undeserved.”

“Glad I’ve got someone on my side,” Balin muttered testily, prompting his father to ruffle his own hair. The sons of Fundin were gifted with thicker locks by far than the sons of Thráin and his braids stayed as they were.

“It’s because he doesn’t find you as vexsome as he does us,” Thorin informed his father brightly.

“Your adad gives me far less cause for vexation,” Balin replied. “For if he unseats himself from his pony today it’ll be counted no one’s fault but his own, whereas if one of you daredevils brains yourself on a treebranch, somehow I’ll get the blame for it.”

“It’s what comes of being the eldest,” Freya told him, laying a consoling hand on his arm as she pocketed her comb.

Balin shot her a pained look. “And I’d accept that if it was my own younger brother alone who I was given charge of, but as it is, somehow I’ve always got a passel of younglings underfoot.”

“Oh, I know those pains well,” Freya rolled her eyes. “I’m my parents’ only, but did that stop my aunt and uncle from giving me Vigg and Frigga to mind? Not once. And truth be told I’m _still_ minding them and they’re grown warriors both! I thought when Vigg married, Heidrún would take over the task for me, but wouldn’t you know - ”

“What ho, sweet sister!” Vigg, naturally, sprinted down over to them, his little daughter on his shoulders, laughing all the way. His dark red hair shone in the sunlight, eclipsed only by his daughter’s halo of brighter curls bouncing all around her head.

“I’m not your sister!” Freya smirked, but submitted to being kissed noisily on the cheek by Vigg and his daughter who she allowed to call her ‘Auntie Freya,’ though they were cousins.

“Come along, slowcoaches!” Heidrek, Vigg’s eldest son, waved to Thorin and Dwalin who took off at once in a race to reach him. “We’ve been waiting ages, the Queen’s just about ready to go off without you!”

“She’d best not!” Freya called out warningly. “She’s a lesson to teach and she knows full well I don’t come within shouting distance of a horse!”

“About that…” Thráin began, but he was cut off by a loud, piercing whistle that brought them all to attention.

The Queen herself galloped forward on a massive beast, all black save for a diamond-splotch of white on his forehead and around his skinny ankles that Freya thought ought not support so large a thing. She stopped well away from them, but Freya still shrank back, the image of a horse-hoof imprinted on her forehead flashing before her eyes. She wound up bumping into Halldóra who had also displayed sense and moved away from Sigdís, showing the most sense out of all of them.

Frerin, of course, ran right up close to the horse, ignoring his mother’s warnings to keep _back_ , lest he lose what little brains he possessed.

“Take me for a ride, Gran?” he pleaded, raising his joined hands in supplication. “Please, please, please, _please?”_

“Nah,” she shook her lead and replied in her deep, booming voice. “Not ‘til later, your sister’s got a lesson.”

“You are not taking my daughter up on that thing,” Freya forbade immediately. She had not gone to the trouble of carrying and birthing the first girl-child of Durin’s line in three generations only for her to be lost falling from a horse because her grandmother had no concept of danger.

Sigdís chuckled and shook her head and replied in a tone that implied Freya was being enormously over-cautious, “As you wish, something a bit less grand for my namesake, eh?”

She turned the horse and led them all back to the paddock where Thrór was waiting with a small, spotted pony on a lead. Gróin and Maeva were there, as well as Glóin who waved to Frerin from the top of his own pony, his expression gleeful.

“I get to ride on my own today,” he reported to the group once they were close enough to hear. “By leave of the King.”

Frerin’s response was utterly predictable; his mouth hung upon, his hand went on his hips and he whinged in his most pathetic voice, “But that’s not _fair!_ Glóin’s three years younger than I am!”

“But a better rider than you by far,” Sigdís said bluntly, dismounting her own horse and ruffling his hair, ruining Freya’s hard work. Freya bit her tongue to keep from shouting something unmannerly at her mother-in-law and queen. Halldóra patted her shoulder in sympathy and tried to hide a smile. “You’ll just have to ride with me later.”

That offer perked the lad right up and he dropped his despairing posture immediately. “Alright,” he agreed eagerly.

Thorin, seeing an opportunity, sidled up to his grandmother and asked, “If Glóin’s allowed his own pony, am I allowed my own horse?”

Sigdís laughed and subjected his head to the same treatment his brother got with similar results. “Grow half a foot and we’ll talk.”

Freya couldn’t bear it another moment longer.

“I don’t care if you get to be five-and-a-half feet tall,” she folded her arms and pursed her lips at Thorin. “It’s ponies for you as long as I walk beneath the earth.”

Thorin did a very good impression of his younger brother then, “But _Ama - ”_

“Work it out later,” Thrór interjected cheerfully, holding his arms out for his granddaughter. “Come along, my lass, want to have a go?”

Even Dóra’s charms could not top the offer of being allowed to sit upon a pony all by herself. Dís used Halldóra as a launch pad to propel herself into her grandfather’s outstretched arms. As the others made ready their mounts in the paddock, Gróin, Maeva, Freya and Halldóra remained on the other side of the fence, though the former two were quick to depart.

“Just taking a little jaunt,” Maeva said. “I’ve got no mind to get on a horse and once she’s done with the children, I know Dísa will start cajoling.”

Gróin snorted and rolled his eyes. “She’s never cajoled a day in her life,” he told his wife as they wandered off, presumably to enjoy a bit of peace now that their youngest was occupied with his cousins. “She _commands_ and has done as long as I can remember - let’s hope the wee one doesn’t inherit, _all_ my sister’s gilded qualities…”

Freya exchanged a look with Halldóra and both dwarrowdams covered their mouths and turned their backs on Gróin; it seemed there was an unspoken contract between himself and his sister not to speak one cordial word about one another unless they’d first spoken ten insults.

“You’d think, after more than two centuries at one another’s throats, they’d call a halt,” Freya murmured to Halldóra.

The older ‘dam smiled and sighed, “According to Fundin, they’ve always been so, as long as he can remember.”

“All the more reason to stop,” Freya said firmly. “It’s childish.”

“I half expect it’s habit now,” Dóra shrugged, resting one foot on the paddock fence, leaning against the top rung on her arms. “I don’t think they mean any harm.”

“They set a very poor example. I’d not want my children speaking to one another like that.”

“Nor I mine,” Dóra owned. “But I don’t think the children are made of such soft stuff that they’ll take any impression set in, they’re dwarves, not wax - oh, don’t you look like a proper horse-master!”

The last was said not to Freya, of course, but Dís. The little girl sat up straight and tall in the saddle, her short legs sticking out a bit on either side. Both hands clutched the saddle pommel, but she lifted one to raise and wave at her mother and Halldóra.

Dóra waved back, but Freya shouted, “You hang on with _both_ hands, miss! Nevermind being personable!”

Thrór seemed to find her fear very funny for he laughed heartily before agreeing that Dís should do what her mother said - only hands on the reigns now, no pulling, and wasn’t she a good girl?

“He seems to be in a good temper,” Freya observed to Halldóra, very quietly.

The smile Dóra was beaming at Dís faded a little, but she nodded.

“He’s been well,” she confirmed. “He doesn’t...he doesn’t like to ask for help, of course, but I think it’s better for him, to be around others, especially the children. It’s not good for anyone to be too much on their own, I don’t think.”

Freya made a noise of agreement in the back of her throat, but said nothing more on the matter. She couldn’t see her husband from where she stood, he had gone back into the stables with the rest of their party to choose a mount. He ought to take his father’s council, though she knew that Thráin’s bad moods did not carry with them the threat of the ruin of the kingdom.

But it was difficult to think of ruin on this cheerful day, even if she was half blinded by sunlight and too hot by half. Sigdís had come into the paddock now and was giving her granddaughter what probably amounted to very good advice about how to sit and where to place her hands. She’d done the same with Thorin and Frerin in the early days of their riding lessons and though Freya thought her mother-in-law reckless with her own life, she had to admit that she respected the children’s limitations.

They called a halt before Dís could become distracted or bored and promised a repeat of the same three days hence. As her daughter was lifted off the pony’s back, she pressed a kiss to the top of his head, to Thrór’s soft-hearted amusement.

Freya was struck by how very different her three children were. When Thorin had his first riding lessons his little face was solemn and he listened most attentively to the instruction he was given. Frerin attempted to drown out his grandmother (no mean feat) shouting, “I’ll do it myself! I’ll do it myself!”

Her daughter, by contrast, simply seemed pleased by the outing. She nodded along and followed her grandmother’s instructions, but she also waved her hand enthusiastically at Freya and Halldóra every time she passed them - and the stableboys, and her cousins, and anyone else who happened to be passing. Thrór never let the pony move too fast and Sigdís was right by her all the while so after that first walked around the paddock, Freya stopped crying out for her daughter to hold on with both hands; no one would ever accuse her of raising timid children.

“Did I do good?” Dís asked her grandmother as she handed her off to her mother over the fence.

“Very good,” Sigdís nodded, with a pleased smile.

“Very well, even,” Dóra interjected with a wink.

“Well ridden,” Freya confirmed, steadying her daughter as she took a seat on the fence. “Better than I would’ve done.”

“You’re sure of that?” Thráin favored a horse that day, it seemed. Not quite as large as the mammoth black thing his mother had been riding, his was the color of copper with a mane that shimmered in the sunlight. It would have been rather pretty, for a horse, if Freya wasn’t so leery of it. Thráin was smiling behind his beard and had a hand outstretched as he took the thing quite close to the paddock fence. “Come on, I’ll be sure you don’t fall.”

Freya could believe neither her eyes nor ears.

“Absolutely not,” she said, shaking her head and walking away with Dís in her arms, held in front of her like a shield. “You must be stark raving - no! I will not! I’ve a child to mind.”

“I’ll take her!” Dóra - nay, not familiar Dóra, but a sly wee traitor of a scribe - offered brightly, extending her arms to receive the child. “We’ll have a merry go of it, won’t we?”

“Aye!” Dís practically toppled out of her mother’s arms, no doubt pleased to pass the time with someone who sang songs and gave treats and otherwise indulged her whims to a level no parent could match and still be called dutiful.

Of _course_ she’d want to stay with Halldóra, if Freya was a child she’d probably adore her as well, but as she was grown she glared hard at her and whispered, “You’re a damned _conspirator.”_

Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth. Dóra smiled, “Go on, it’ll be good for you!”

“A hot soak in a dark room would be good for me,” Freya countered. “Away from all this awful sunlight and this smell. If it’s such a wholesome activity, why don’t you join your husband atop his beast?”

Fundin laughed heartily from the back of yet another enormous nightmare creature, this one grey and speckled. “Her shrieking frights the beasts, Thráin swore you were made of sterner stuff.”

“You took wagers, I presume,” Freya gritted out, feeling she was fighting a losing battle.

Vigg too was all smiles, though he chose for his mount a more sensibly sized pony rather than a great ridiculous horse.

“I’ve laid down a pretty penny in your favor,” he said, little Hervor sat prettily before him, bold and fearless as anything. “Don’t let me down, dearie!”

The confederacy was really too much; a secret conference of dwarves who all unexpectedly wished for her demise. Freya was not so proud that she could not admit she had faults, but she thought they bore more affection in their hearts for her than this. And yet her husband’s hand was still outstretched.

“Just a quick turn,” he asked, his voice taking on a note of pleading. “And if you want me to let you down, I’ll do it.”

She almost refused again. Almost reminded him, in front of his entire family, how many times she had made requests of him - simple ones, _Won’t you come to dinner?_ _Won’t you come to bed?_ _Won’t you kiss the children goodnight?_ \- and been silently rebuffed. But it would start a row and she would not be responsible for spoiling this day. Not when it had begun with such promise.

Not even if it meant parting with blood or limb in the pursuit of her husband’s pleasure, Freya thought sourly to herself as she climbed atop the fence and took a seat behind her husband. Her arms immediately went about his waist and she gripped his belt with white-knuckled fingers, as if it was her only lifeline.

“I can’t abide you sometimes,” she muttered with her brow pressed tight against Thráin’s back. Distantly she was aware of hooting and whistles that sounded like the younglings and, of course, _Vigg_ being insufferable. She hoped that they fired cannons at her funeral.

There was movement beneath her and Freya shut her eyes tightly as she felt Thráin’s chest expand. If he _laughed_ at her - but he did not laugh. Instead, he sighed.

“I know,” he replied, urging the horse forward. “And I thank you for indulging me.”

Freya raised her head just long enough to see her daughter waving and calling good-bye as the party left the paddock gates. She couldn’t see her husband’s face, but was burning to know his expression, but it was not to be. With a bit of pressure on the horse’s sides, they were off and she reinserted her face between his shoulderblades.

* * *

Thráin was an able rider, even on horseback. He supposed he had to be, otherwise his mother would have disowned him and what a pity that would have been for his father as the Queen would never have another one after him.

Sometimes he wondered what grievous failing on his parents’ part caused them to have a son such as him. Disappointingly average in all things, save a good head for figures that was no legacy from either of them.

Óin used to tease him when they were small that he wasn’t his parents’ son at all, but a changeling switched for the true heir in the dead of night by spiteful faeries who wished to do the kingdom ill. For a long while he believed it too, gullible youth he had been, but once he had his own any doubts about his own parentage were overthrown. He had three children and they were all as different from himself and his wife as it was possible to be.

Well, he mused, watching Thorin and Dwalin drive Fundin to distraction as they drove their ponies harder than the poor beasts were of a mind to run, Frerin and Dís were nothing like himself and his wife. To his eternal dismay, he could not but notice that he and his eldest shared many commonalities, most of them deeply unpleasant. His second son had a gregarious showmanship that he’d inherited directly from Thrór while Dís was as sweet and affectionate a lass as could be - qualities whose source he did not know, being that neither her parents nor her grandparents could be termed ‘sweet’ and their shows of affection came more in gruff praise, good-natured teasing, and blows on the back, not in hugs and kisses and abundant ‘I-love-you’s.

Could be she got it all from Herdís, Freya’s mother, he mused as he rode on at a sedate pace, his wife crushing his innards to jelly as she clung on to him. But Dís had an adventurous spirit his mother-in-law did not share; she’d declined to join them on the day’s outing citing a loathing of wind, wet, heat, and sunlight.

Speaking of a lack of an adventurous spirit…

“How are you faring?” Thráin asked his wife over his shoulder.

“Well, I’m not in the Halls,” she spoke into his coat. “There aren’t any horses in the Halls, I’m sure.”

“Want to stop?”

There was a contemplative pause and he felt the grip around his waist ease up ever so slightly. “I suppose if you haven’t killed me now, you have no plans to - unless you seek to lull me into a false sense of safety and do the deed later.”

Thráin chuckled and shook his head, treading a path well away from the gaiety of the rest of the riding party; he trusted Fundin and his mother to keep the younglings in line, even if his father and Vigg couldn’t be trusted to raise a harsh word when tomfoolery called for it.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, urging the horse on over a little brook. “Trust me.”

Freya snorted a little ruefully, but said nothing. Thráin could not blame her for showing a prickle of irritation - what had he really done to warrant her trust in their marriage? How many times had he let her down or broken it?

“This is all rather different,” Freya commented idly, her voice less muffled than it had been. She was leaning her head sideways against his back and Thráin wondered if she’d opened her eyes yet. “I’ve never known you to indulge whims. Should I expect more of this in the future?”

“Not likely,” he admitted. Truth be told, this was no whim, he’d agonized over the decision for weeks, ever since Dís’s riding lesson turned into a family outing. He’d rather been looking forward to spending a few hours alone with his wife, he could hardly remember the last time they’d done more than apprise one another of their respective schedules for the day and bid one another goodnight when they managed to fall into bed at the same time.

If he was to be very honest, he’d have to admit that it wasn’t even his idea, though he was sure Freya suspected as much. When he grumbled in the forge that he could hardly enjoy a free afternoon surrounded by one and a half score children and relations, Fundin said, _I don’t mind seeing to the lads if you and your missus want time to yourself. Take her off to a quiet side of the rock, there won’t be many about, it being so hot above ground._

When Thráin pointed out that his wife didn’t ride, Fundin smiled at him and replied, _Neither does Dóra, but there’s no telling what a body’ll brave for a spot of privacy when it’s needed._

And so there they were, their family and friends fast retreating specks on the horizon. Something wild and fluttering reared back in Thráin’s chest, the promise of relief. What a thing, to leave them all behind, to shuck off the burdens of his post and duties. To vanish.

Yet even as the thought occurred to him, he banished it from his mind immediately. There was work to attend to after all, the court would be thrown into chaos if he left, not to mention the presumed panic that would ensue and, if he indulged sentimentality for a minute, the fact that he - that _they_ \- would be missed by those who loved them.

Freya let out a little squeak of dismay that brought him crashing back to earth faster than his rationality did. He’d spurred the horse on to running in his longing and he made the beast temper his pace back. They’d gotten far enough away from the others that it was as if they were alone in the world already.

Thráin stopped beside a pond so the horse could refresh itself with water and nibble a bit of grass, if it was of a mind to. He helped Freya down and when he was finished tending to their mount, found her standing where he’d left her with her hands crossed over her chest and an expectant expression on her face.

“Now what?” she asked, looking around as if she expected an Orc to spring out behind a rock and cleave her in twain.

Thráin shrugged and in doing so removed his coat; it was forge-hot outside and he could feel the sweat pooling at the small of his back already.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, tossing the heavy garment over an obliging bush. “I hadn’t thought much beyond getting away from the others.”

Tsking, Freya took her own coat off and laid it more neatly atop her husband’s.

“Just a ploy for solitude, then?” she asked with her back to him, smoothing the fabric unnecessarily. “I wonder that you asked me along.”

“I wasn’t aiming for solitude,” he replied, making to draw near to her, but she slipped away before he could grasp her.

“It’s too hot,” she informed him coolly. “And I’m not a plaything to be cast aside when you’ve tired of me and picked up again, the dust swept off, when you’re in a better mood.”

“I don’t think that of you,” Thráin said uncomfortably, meeting his wife’s sharp gaze as she arched an eyebrow at him.

“Don’t you?” she asked. “Why make a show of taking me away, then? Without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“Oh, by the Maker’s anvil,” Thráin retorted, mouth twisting downward as his arms folded over his chest. “Don’t make off as if I blindfolded you and dragged you out here kicking and screaming; you agreed to come.”

Freya had no answer to make, nor Thráin a reply to give. For several long, uncomfortable minutes, they stood by glaring at one another until Freya threw up her hands in frustration and said, “Are we fighting now? What are we fighting about?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Thráin replied shortly, feeling his jaw ache from holding it so stiffly for so long. “Habit?”

Amazingly, Freya laughed, loudly and sincerely, “I suppose so. What a pair we make, eh? Alright, out with it: who was it told you to whisk me off for ‘getting away,’ as you put it? I know you don’t think so meanly of me that you think I believe for an instant that this was your idea.”

“Fundin,” Thráin admitted freely. “Last time I take his advice.”

Freya nodded, a suspicion had clearly been confirmed. “If not Fundin, I’d have guessed Dóra. He might not talk as much, but he’s every inch the busybody that his wife is.”

“Dóra’s court scribe,” Thráin bristled slightly to hear his wife speak so poorly of their kin; though truth be told it was an observation he himself might have made had he been the victim of their scheming. As it was, the words had not come from his own mouth and so he reserved the right to be offended by them. “Her livelihood is knowing everyone’s business.”

“She was just angling to get some time alone with Dís,” Freya huffed, making toward the pond. “I’m soaking my feet, the heat is awful - if she wants a wee one to mind, let her have her own and leave my children to me.”

Thráin bit the inside of his mouth to keep from shouting at her. They’d already been through one small row, to begin another so soon on the heels of the first would end badly, he knew this from experience. “I’m sure she would, if she could,” he observed quietly.

Freya paused in rolling the cuffs of her trousers. Slowly, deliberately, she sat down at the water’s edge and dangled her feet in. “I’m sorry,” she said, subdued. “That was cruel of me.”  
It was and as his wife was well aware of her cruelty, Thráin did not feel the need to point it out to her. He didn’t say anything, in fact, just sat down beside Freya, removing his own shoes and socks to soak his feet up to the knee. Water seeped into his trousers and he swore quietly, rolling them higher, but the damage was done.

“We’re actually lucky, aren’t we?” Freya laughed humorlessly. “Despite...Durin’s beard, despite the fussing and the trouble and...we’re lucky. No, we’re not even that, we’re _ungrateful_ , you and I.”

 _Especially you,_ was her unspoken chastisement. Freya didn’t speak the words, but Thráin felt their import, from the way she said ‘ _you_ and I,’ to the shoulder that might have brushed against him, but that she held stiffly, a hairsbreath away.

“We are that,” he agreed. Then, “I’m sorry.”

Freya nodded, frowning, “But admitting it, doesn’t change aught, does it?”

Thráin had no idea whether she was speaking about him or the both of them. Either way, it didn’t matter. Sixty years of marriage meant falling into ruts, like traveling the same roads over and over. Carts got stuck, roads washed out and crumbled from overuse. Maintenance could only do so much, especially if the damage went deep into the bedrock.

So rather than vowing to change, making promises that could not be kept, reassuring Freya that things would be different, somehow, if only they tried hard enough, Thráin instead said, “Not a bad day.”

Freya looked at him. Her shoulders relaxed and they touched.

“Not a bad day,” she agreed. “Even so. Not a bad day, but for the damned _heat.”_

She stood up and he was sure she was going to order him to turn back, but instead she shucked her tunic off over her head, laying aside her necklaces, bracelets, rings, and combs. So too went her trousers and small clothes and she nodded toward the pond.

“Care for a swim?” she asked, a glint in her eye that made Thráin slightly wary.

“You don’t know how,” he replied. For all that Freya liked a good long soak in the baths, her opinion on swimming ran along the same lines as her opinion on horsemanship; no fit occupation for a proper dwarf.

“True,” she nodded. “So you’ll have to decide what you fancy more - your trousers or your wife.”

And before he could stop her, before he quite realized what it was she intended to do, she took a running leap and jumped into the blue-green water, hair streaming behind her like a banner. Thráin dove in after her - toppled, really, clothes and all. She hadn’t time to sink down very far before he hooked an arm around her waist and tugged her to the surface.

Freya choked and spluttered as he pulled her along, not stopping until his feet touched round stones and slimy mud and he stood waist-deep in water and reeds. “What were you _thinking?”_ he thundered, in a tone he used on Frerin much more frequently than Freya. “You might’ve drowned!”

“Might I?” she asked between coughs, managing to look arch even as she gagged on freshwater. “Were you thinking of saving the trousers after all?”

“No, of course not!” he exclaimed, hands locked around her shoulders to hold her upright, just in case she slipped or tried to run off again. “What _possessed_ you?”

Freya caught her breath and peered up at him coyly through the curtains of hair falling over her face, “It wasn’t so great a risk, was it? You were there the whole time. You wouldn’t let me drown, would you?”

“Is that what that was?” Thráin demanded angrily. “A test? Of what?”

“I don’t know!” she threw her arms up as if she hadn’t a care in the world, shaking her wet hair out of her eyes as she did. “I don’t know why I did it and now it’s done. I was angry with you before I did it and now I’m not. Can that be good enough for you?”

Thráin wanted to shout at her that no, of _course_ it wasn’t good enough. But how many times had he given her unsatisfactory answers, or worse, no answer at all when she asked why he was unhappy. To push the point would be to make a hypocrite of himself and Thráin had failings enough without adding hypocrisy to the list.

Frowning down at himself, he replied instead, “You owe me a new suit of clothes.”

Freya laughed at that and there was genuine mirth in the sound this time. “Do I! What a boon, for you wear your gabardine down so much that I’m ashamed to know you. If this is what it takes to get you to the tailor, I’m jumping into ponds more often.”

“You’d best not,” Thráin said warningly, wringing his tunic out for all the good it did him.

Freya reached for his head, smiling hugely, “Hang on, you’ve got - ”

She pulled a pulpy, decomposing swath of weeds out of his hair which only deepened Thráin’s grumpy expression.

“You’re lucky you’re handsome when you’re frowning,” his wife said, flinging the muck back into the water.

“I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t have married me otherwise,” he replied, feeling a smile tug at his lips despite himself.

Freya clambered out of the water and threw an arch look over her shoulder. “Too right,” she replied. “I wouldn’t.”

By the time they returned to their fellows they were clean and relatively dry. No worse for wear than Thorin and Dwalin, whose faces were covered over with little scratches and cuts. Their manner was subdued compared to their earlier high spirits while Glóin and Frerin looked downright gleeful.

“Right into a bramble patch!” Frerin announced to his parents when he marked their approach from his place sitting before his grandmother. “Mister Fundin told them to slow down, but did they listen? _No.”_

“Got what was coming to them,” Glóin replied smugly, looking totally unruffled on his pony.

“That’s enough out of you two,” Thrór reprimanded them lightly. “I think they’ve learned their lesson - about fifty times o’er. You’d think you’d have a softer heart for your brother and your cousins!”

“They’re heartless,” Thorin mumbled, wiping at a few of his wounds which sluggishly bled down his cheek.

“Learned from the best,” Dwalin muttered as quietly as he was able, which was not very, shooting a very dark look at his aunt.

Sigdís sat up even straighter in the saddle, thoroughly unmoved. “I haven’t got a thimbleful of sympathy for you,” she told her nephew. “No less than you deserve.”

Thorin turned enormous blue eyes, full of woe, on his mother, but Freya just shook her head. “You should pay more heed to Mister Fundin - I hope your sister was better behaved with Missus Halldóra.”

Dís was not behaving in any particular way when they returned to the paddock. She was fast asleep in a shady spot under a tree, her head pillowed against Dóra’s side while she used the dwarrowdam’s coat as a bedroll. Freya almost leapt off the horse at the sight, but settled for shouting instead, “You’d better not be letting her sleep! When she’s up all night, I’m depositing her on _your_ doorstep!”

Dóra looked up from the book she was reading to smile sedately at Freya, “Oh, tosh! It hasn’t been above a half an hour - ah, and there she wakes.”

Dís sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes with one hand and burrowing her face into Halldóra’s side, “I’m hungry,” she announced sleepily. “Are they back?”

“They are indeed,” Dóra said, nodding her head at Thráin and Freya. “Go catch them.”

Shaking off the last vestiges of sleep, Dís picked herself up and ran at her parents. Freya caught her in her arms before she could get too close to the horse. “Oof! Did you behave yourself for Missus Dóra?”

Dís nodded, shaking leaves out of her hair as she did so, “We climbed a tree and she told me a story and she singed to me and I had a nap, is it time for eating now?”

“That’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all day,” Thorin remarked, wiping his face again and staining his cuffs with blood. “Well done, namad.”

Dís stared at his face with wide eyes and exclaimed, “You got hurt!”

“What?” Dóra started from the ground, squinting at Thorin in alarm. “Oh, you poor thing, what happened?”

Thorin seemed pleased to have someone look upon his plight with a kindly eye and started telling a tale of bewitched thorn bushes rising up from the road and attacking himself and Dwalin who were doing nothing more terrible than chancing to ride by.

“Don’t you believe that tale for a minute,” Fundin said over all their heads. “If I’ve told you lads once, I’ve told you a hundred times - ”

“Don’t drive the ponies too hard,” Balin chimed in at the same time as his father. He hadn’t anything at all to say about the younglings’ accident, save smirking every time they were told off for for trying to court others’ pity. “Could be they’re a trifle deaf.”

“Sore shame to hear it,” Fundin shook his head sadly. “They being so young.”

“Ow! Not so hard, Ama!” Dwalin protested when his mother’s handkerchief set to mopping his brow. Dóra had to hold him by the front of his shirt to get his face on a level with hers.

Thorin laughed openly at Dwalin’s plight, but all his mirth disappeared when Thráin caught him around the shoulders and started cleaning his own face.

“Your handkerchief smells like a bog,” Thorin complained, but Thráin didn’t cease his task.

“That wouldn’t be a concern to you if you’d done as you were bid,” he scowled at his son. “When your wee baby sister minds better than you, I’ve got to wonder you aren’t hard of hearing after all.”

“Or stubborn,” Freya offered. “At least there’s some precedent there.”

Thráin tried to fix her with a sardonic look over Thráin’s head, but they were distracted by Gróin and Maeva arriving back on the scene.

“Still haven’t killed yourself up on those beasts, namad?” Gróin shouted at Sigdís.

“Not yet!” she hollered back. “Why, got money laid down on the odds?”

“I’ve lost money, you mean!”

“Sorry to disappoint you!”

Thráin had been about to retort that there was no such precedent and what was his wife talking about, but the second his mother and uncle started in on one another he knew he couldn’t say so with a straight face. Freya and Thráin rolled their eyes at one another as the chatter started all around them about whether or not Sigdís would meet her end on the back of a horse (general consensus - not likely) and whether they ought to continue on to Dale for a meal or hie back to the Mountain.

As the chatter around them turned from suggesting, to disagreeing, to out and out arguing, husband and wife kept their mouths shut, gritting their teeth against the chaos and noise all around them; in perfect harmony for the first time in a long time.


End file.
